Environment Committee on March 27th, 2018

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

That's fine. Thank you very much. I personally am still very fond of the 2005 plan, because it was audited by Pembina at the time, and they said it would get us very close to Kyoto. I know it was a long time ago, but my problem is my memory, and I really liked that plan.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Elizabeth, you have one more minute. I picked up the wrong card, so my apologies.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Oh...no, it's okay. I know we have very little time with the witnesses.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

We do.

Thank you.

If that's okay, we'll move on to Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you, Commissioner, for appearing again. It's good to have you back.

As you know, one of the tools being used in the pan-Canadian framework on climate change is carbon pricing—carbon taxes and cap and trade. We had the minister at committee very recently—in fact, at our last meeting—and despite our efforts to secure from her an admission that a greenhouse gas emission gap exists, she was not prepared to admit it.

Are you able to say whether Canada presently has a gap between meeting its Paris Agreement targets and the present trajectory of our greenhouse gas reductions?

[Julie Gelfand]

I would say it's quite clear from the information the government has provided that even if everything in the pan-Canadian framework is implemented, there will still be a gap to achieving the target, yes.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Would it somewhere in the order of 66 megatonnes?

[Julie Gelfand]

Yes. I was going to say 50 to 60 megatonnes—in that zone, yes.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

All right.

[Julie Gelfand]

Now the federal government has indicated that it hasn't added in a series of other activities, but right now, from the information we receive, it's quite clear there's still a gap.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

That's very helpful.

Now with respect to a carbon tax, some provinces have a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system. Some don't have any carbon pricing. We also asked the minister at the last meeting if she could tell us how much of an effect a $50-per-tonne carbon price, once fully implemented across Canada, would have on greenhouse gas emissions. She was either unable or unwilling to say.

In your work with the provinces in auditing progress under the federal government's climate change plan, have you been able to identify whether any work has been done by any government within Canada on how much a carbon price will lead to emissions?

[Julie Gelfand]

I'll start to answer that, and maybe Kim will add to it.

What I can say is that a general comment we found across all of these plans was that governments were having a hard time figuring out how many greenhouse gas emissions action A would lead to and how many action B would lead to. They were having difficulty just generally, not with any one tool but almost with all of the tools, identifying clearly what the contributions would be.

Also, we've heard concern about action A actually interfering with action B and maybe having a negative impact on action B, or about what I might term “policy coherence”. Are all the actions actually coherent? It wasn't clear that governments had done enough analysis to achieve that.

Do you want to add anything?

[Kimberley Leach, Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General]

Just on the point of whether there is a government you can look to that has done that sort of modelling and has the answer, I would point out that in the text box that we have in exhibit 1 on carbon pricing, we mention that the Government of British Columbia had committed to increasing its carbon tax to $50 a tonne by 2021. We don't talk about the greenhouse gases that will be reduced by that, but it may be that the B.C. government government has done that modelling.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

It's very interesting that you would mentioned my home province of British Columbia. We were just talking about Nova Scotia, and now we're talking about British Columbia.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Julie Gelfand]

We talk about all the provinces in our report.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Yes. I'm glad you're working with all the provinces, because this is a national strategy. If we don't get it right, we could pay a big economic price and a big environmental price, which is why I'm glad you're here.

In British Columbia, of course, the carbon tax was introduced with a very clear understanding that it was going to be revenue-neutral: every dollar raised on the carbon tax would be returned to taxpayers, either corporate taxpayers, business taxpayers, or individual taxpayers.

The recent election of an NDP government in British Columbia changed all that. They eliminated the revenue neutrality and jacked up the tax by another five bucks, which of course means that this has now become a cash cow for the Government of British Columbia. That has been my fear all along: that governments across Canada but more specifically the federal government has not done the analysis to understand how much a $50-per-tonne carbon price will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Without having the evidence, that mathematical understanding, we're moving forward with a policy that impacts our economy, that in fact tilts the playing field against Canadian businesses trying to do business in a very competitive global marketplace.

In your work with the provinces, is there anybody who actually has done the work of determining what emission reductions we can expect for the carbon price the federal government expects Canadians to pay?

[Julie Gelfand]

I believe we've answered that question by saying that we don't have that information. We know that the provinces and the federal government were having difficulty assigning how much greenhouse gas reduction would occur for each of their individual activities.

I was going to say, though, that between 1:30 and 3 o'clock we are holding a public webinar. The auditors general of British Columbia and Nova Scotia—where did he go?—will both be on that webinar, along with the principal who was responsible for the Northwest Territories. If your staff would like to participate, we could ask the auditor general of British Columbia directly whether or not they have that analysis.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

It's probably a good idea. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

Thank you very much.

Next up is Mr. Rogers.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

I have just a couple of questions, because many of the questions I was going to ask have been answered already, I won't repeat them.

I was looking at page 10 of the text of your remarks where you say that “greenhouses gases have yet to go down”. I was surprised to hear that, because we visited the west just a couple of weeks ago and heard from many groups in Alberta and from the global forum about things that are going on—innovative things to control greenhouse gas emissions, carbon capture, and all that stuff. It's surprising that there hasn't been some reduction.

When I look at the comments about climate change, I think that's pretty obvious across the country, given all of the issues we've had in different parts of the country with floods and fires and all of that stuff.

You were saying, “Meeting the...2030 target will require significant effort and actions on top of what is currently planned or in place.” I'm left wondering what specific actions you would recommend or suggest to the federal government. Is it more financial resources, more human resources, or legislative action? What's required to accomplish that objective?

[Julie Gelfand]

Again, my role is to be an auditor, which is to audit against what the federal government says it's going to do. It's not my role to provide you with advice on what the federal government should do on this issue.

What I can say as an auditor is that we look to the pan-Canadian framework, and we expect that when we audit that framework we will see implementation plans that are clear, with clear accountabilities and clear allocation of resources to be able to implement that plan.

It is also clear from the information from the federal government that there is still a gap, and I understand that the government has a series of other activities that were not included in the pan-Canadian framework that they indicate will contribute to reductions—things like transit and all the other investments—but we haven't audited these. When I come back in 2020 or in 2021 and we've audited the beginnings of the pan-Canadian framework, we'll be able to give you more information.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Thank you very much for that. I'm just happy to see that you mentioned my home province, as well, on a couple of occasions, and we're happy to see that some things are happening, of course, that will get us to the targets we want to get to by 2020 or 2030. I realize that the targets are not being met from your perspective at this point, so that's why I was asking the question what specifically we need to do as parliamentarians and legislators and governments, federal and provincial, to get us to that level.

[Julie Gelfand]

One of the things you can do is something this committee can do, and I know it does already. We have a section called “Moving Forward”. It's a series of questions that all legislators can ask of their government. It's on page 25 of 26. These are questions that you can ask your government officials, and you can keep asking them. You can ask for their action plans and keep asking them these questions. That is why we put these questions in there, to provide you with some tools to hold your governments to account.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Perfect. Now we're getting somewhere.

Thank you very much for that, Madam Speaker. I've concluded my remarks.