Environment Committee on Oct. 29th, 2009

Evidence of meeting #35 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was target.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Bill C-311, An Act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change

Committee Business

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Robert Hornung President, Canadian Wind Energy Association

John Drexhage Director, Climate Change and Energy, International Institute for Sustainable Development

Matthew Bramley Director, Climate Change, Pembina Institute

Aldyen Donnelly President, Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium

12:50 p.m.

Conservative

Jeff Watson Conservative Essex, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thanks to the members for eating up a lot of time here today.

In a full cost accounting, the Parliamentary Budget Officer goes on to say that there could be key assumptions that have to be made about responses of monetary policy as well. In other words, in a nutshell he's proposing something that would take about 12 months to produce that would be far more comprehensive, and I think it would be far more valuable to this committee if he could undertake that study.

But my point here is that this only represents a particular and, I would say, narrow opinion, first of all. And secondly, I would go on to suggest that the assumptions that are made in here.... I think The Globe and Mail noted that Canada would have to turn itself into an environmental paradise overnight. It's a perfect case scenario and it really represents some things that are unrealistic--the California emission standards, for example. Buzz Hargrove of the Canadian Auto Workers union, a couple of years ago called that suicidal for the auto industry. It's not a realistic thing.

Don Drummond himself says that it's not reasonable to expect that technical advances will provide a solution by 2020, yet you're assuming certain things in the account itself.

Have you proposed this unrealistic policy scenario to cover what the actual costs are? They could be higher than what they're calling an economic upheaval, the biggest fiscal shock in Canadian history, deeply disruptive to the economy? Have you in fact underestimated what could be significantly higher costs to the economy?

12:50 p.m.

Director, Climate Change, Pembina Institute

Matthew Bramley

First of all, I object to the suggestion that there's been any dishonesty on our side in this study. We've tried to take a comprehensive look at some ambitious emission reductions in the public domain to try to elevate the level of debate and to try to get away from the kinds of discussions where there is a focus on negative elements rather than looking at the overall picture.

The model we chose is a mainstream model that's been used by the federal government and, on a number of occasions, by provincial governments, including Alberta. There are a number of conservative assumptions. For example, we assumed that Canada would be going substantially further than other OECD countries in its level of climate policies. We didn't take any account of the use of forests to reduce emissions because the models were not capable of that, but that would be another potentially low-cost opportunity.

Other models exist that produce lower costs than this. And when it comes to the international reductions, we used much higher prices than are usually used. Those are all conservative elements of this work.

And frankly, I object to the suggestion that there's any attempt here to produce numbers that are not objective.