Environment Committee on Oct. 16th, 2018

[Matt Jones]

I would have to look back at the policies of other countries, but no, I can't think of one off the top of my head.

[Wayne Stetski]

It would be interesting to hear, just so that we could correlate the two.

Earlier on, Ms. Mamdani, you talked about $2.65 billion over five years going to developing countries, with the focus on women. Can you tell me how that translates to a woman on the ground in a third world country? They're great words, and I love the words, but how does that actually impact the women on the ground in these countries?

[Anar Mamdani]

Sure. Thank you very much for that question.

What I will give you an example of is how that is translating into some of the work we're doing. Our feminist international assistance policy is guiding all of the work we're doing. Access to financial resources is one means through which we are trying to impact women on the ground. That includes climate risk insurance and other repayable financial tools, which are essential to people but especially to women and their families, to allow them to bounce back and adapt to climate change, especially in the wake of disasters. Women and girls, though they are often the most impacted by extreme weather events, are also the least likely to have access to financial resources to recover and rebuild their lives and livelihoods.

Some of the work we are doing is to ensure that women have access to financial resources, particularly, and are more resilient in the face of extreme weather events. That is one example, but there are numerous other ones, particularly from the perspective of the roles we play with the multilateral development banks and the governing bodies that we are a part of.

We are a leader in terms of ensuring that a gender perspective is brought to those discussions to ensure that the programming we do that is supported by those multilateral development banks has a gender lens applied to it. That is more from a policy level setting, but the example I gave in terms of access to financial resources actually is how it translates on the ground.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

With that, we're out of time and we need to prepare for our next panel.

To all of the departmental officials, thank you so much for being here. It's always a pleasure hearing from you. Feel free to go home and enjoy the evening, and we'll get ready for the next panel.

Thank you so much.

We'll suspend for two minutes.

[The Chair]

Welcome to our next two guests. Laura Sacks and Judy O'Leary are both group leaders and B.C. coordinators with the Citizens' Climate Lobby, Nelson-West Kootenay chapter.

What we're going to do is give you nine minutes for opening comments, and then we'll do the same format. We'll go through with one round of six minutes from the Liberals, six minutes from the Conservatives, go back to the Liberals for six minutes, and then go to Wayne for three minutes.

We have some newcomers. Michael Levitt, welcome. Mike Bossio, welcome back to your seat at the table. Mr. Cannings, it's always a pleasure to see you.

Ladies, it's over to you.

[Judy O'Leary, Group Leader and BC Coordinator, Nelson-West Kootenay Chapter, Citizens' Climate Lobby]

Hello. As mentioned, we're from Citizens' Climate Lobby. This is a volunteer, non-partisan group of volunteers. It's an international organization. We coordinate for British Columbia. There are members all across Canada, including in Ottawa.

Laura and I both have environmental and policy expertise, but we're here as volunteers and citizens who see climate work as the most pressing issue of our time. We thank you for this invitation, and we also thank you for the great work that this committee continues to do. We're very appreciative of that. We're also appreciative of those of you who stayed up late last night in the climate change debate; that's wonderful.

I think we can acknowledge that everyone in this room cares a lot about the environment—that was clear for us to see, as we listened to you—and no doubt very worried about climate change and the best way to address it. I would say that all of us share the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that we have a lot of common ground, regardless of our political stripe.

We are going to briefly cover, as a tag team, three points today—the urgency, the best tools to tackle the problem and the great opportunity that we have in the midst of this crisis. We'll leave some material for the analysts.

I'll turn it over to Laura.

[Laura Sacks, Group Leader and BC Coordinator, Nelson-West Kootenay Chapter, Citizens' Climate Lobby]

Thank you, Judy.

The urgency is very clear, as we see with the recent IPCC report that just came out. We need to take effective action, and very quickly, to stay under 1.5° C and also to avoid the worst damage.

Public concern across the country is clear. An Abacus poll from this year shows that the top two concerns among Canadians are health care and climate change. We need to recognize that climate change is causing severe health issues, for example, from air quality and from mental health issues around floods, fires and evacuations. We certainly saw major impacts across Canada this summer from floods, severe heat, wildfires and even tornadoes.

On a personal level, our summer in the interior of B.C. was quite horrific. We had 20 days when we were advised to stay indoors because the wildfire smoke was so bad it was choking. One could hardly see across the street. We went from floods and landslides almost straight to wildfires, and it impacted us in our communities very personally.

For example, a friend of mine who had a baby under one year old was renovating the kitchen, so she had an outdoor kitchen, and she's very concerned about long-term impacts on her young baby's developing lungs from all that fine particulate matter he breathed.

Another example is my elderly neighbour, who had burning lungs for weeks. My neighbour went to the doctor and was told, “Yes, we're seeing a lot of people like this. Some people have to go the emergency room, but really the only thing they can do is send you home and tell you to close your windows and hope you have an air filter.” It became really personal in our area.

We understand that climate change is an international problem and that emissions need to reduce rapidly to stay below one and a half degrees or two degrees. It's also clear that the differences in the impacts of a one-and-a-half-degree world and a two-degree world are quite significant.

We have concerns about stranded assets and public investments in the oil and gas sector here in Canada, as the world needs to move quickly away from fossil fuels. If we want the goals of the Paris Agreement to succeed, we need to start redirecting investments now.

Already, impacts from climate change are causing huge economic impacts. Hon. Ralph Goodale recently stated that losses from floods and fires are causing Canadian taxpayers $1 billion a year, and the future costs of doing nothing or very little will continue to increase—for example, ever-worsening wildfires, floods, superstorms, droughts, ocean acidification, sea level rise and climate refugees.

For me, it gets pretty scary when you look the problem directly in the eye.

[Judy O'Leary]

What do we do about this problem? Our organization believes that a steadily rising price on carbon pollution needs to be the foundation of any climate plan. It certainly isn't the only tool, but we believe it is the most cost-effective way to accelerate the transition to a cleaner economy and to produce innovative solutions.

This particular approach of focusing on carbon pricing as the major tool has been confirmed by the two Nobel prize winners in economics.

We can achieve the same end goal. As I said, I believe we all want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You can do it through carbon pricing and other tools, or you can focus more heavily on a regulatory approach. You get to the same end, but the difficulty with a regulatory approach is that it's extremely costly to administer and very inflexible. Our feeling is you should use that at a minimum, and focus on the pricing.

I assume you're familiar with the Ecofiscal Commission's work. They did a study that compared the two. They looked at the period from 2015 to 2020. They did the analysis to determine the difference between going with pure carbon pricing and going with the regulatory approach. The regulatory approach resulted in a 3.8% hit to GDP. That's a 3.8% decrease. There was very little impact from carbon pricing.

This isn't anything to do with politics. It's about finding where you get the best bang for your buck and how you can get the job done without impacting the economy as much.

Our primary ask is for price certainty for industry and households. We would like to see some confirmation that the carbon price will keep rising steadily at least past 2030.

The question raised earlier was about how high it has to go. We think the biggest impact is from that certainty. People in businesses know it's going to keep rising, and so they start to change behaviour. That's going to make a bigger difference than arguing about how high it has to go.

We also need to make sure the carbon price covers all emissions, including methane fugitive emissions, which are quite significant, and is as upstream as possible to have the biggest effect.

We also need to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and other supports for the fossil fuel industry, such as tax and royalty breaks. We've seen some progress at the federal level, and we hope that as a federal government you will also use some pressure on the provinces, in particular B.C. and Alberta, which have significant supports in place for a well-established fossil fuel industry that we need to transition out of.

The revenue issue is key so that carbon pricing isn't seen as a tax grab. We're seeing some push-back in B.C. right now because it's no longer revenue neutral. We also need to look at the carbon tax revenue so that it doesn't, as was mentioned here, disproportionately harm the poor.

Take, for example, the recent work by Mark Cameron at the Clean Prosperity Institute. He comes from a Conservative background. He has finally given us the clear evidence that we've heard you discussing in the House of Commons, the numbers on what this is going to cost.

Mark Cameron has done this, and we have left some copies of that here. He shows that if you return the tax revenue to households, poor and lower-middle-class people will come out further ahead and most of the burden will be borne by the wealthy. I hope you will have a look at that.

We feel that B.C. clearly shows... There was some mention earlier that the emissions did not decrease while the B.C. carbon tax was in place, and I need to correct that. There are eight independent studies that show that while the carbon tax was rising, emissions did fall and GDP wasn't affected.

We think there's an opportunity for Canada to be a leader in the world on market-based solutions to climate change.

[Laura Sacks]

Solving the climate crisis is also a huge economic and health opportunity. The World Health Organization calls climate change the number one threat to human health in the 21st century. Conversely, addressing climate change is an incredible opportunity to improve health; for example, cleaner air and water quality and healthier populations by having more options for active transportation.

Globally we have a—

[The Chair]

We're running out of time.

[Laura Sacks]

Okay. I'm just going to say we have a huge opportunity here. Canada does have the opportunity to lead.

I'm going to wrap it up with a statement to you as leaders.

We're at a crossroads. The question I have for you is this: Will I be able to let my daughters, both in their early 20s, know how we want to be remembered as people? Will it be as those who took strong action at a time of crisis, or those who were timid and didn't make the hard decisions about the changes we needed so they can have a livable world for their children and themselves?

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you for your opening comments.

We're going to start our questioning with six minutes to Mr. Bossio.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you both so much for being here at our meeting. What you had to say really does hit home.

Too many times we point out that the price on pollution is going to cause such hardship for so many taxpayers in our society, but as you stated, our taxpayers are already paying an inordinate amount of money every time we have another fire season in B.C., or Alberta, or northern Ontario or wherever it is, or when we have droughts, giving payouts to farmers and others to bring back their water. There are also floods and the impact we're seeing on health care budgets because of air pollution, which is causing so many problems with the health of Canadians. In essence, we're looking at a cost of billions of dollars that is borne on the backs of taxpayers.

Under a price for pollution, the largest emitters, the wealthiest, who we know on average pollute far more than the less wealthy emitters, will pay more into a system like that. It is in a revenue-neutral system that we'll see our lowest-income Canadians actually benefit financially from this price on pollution, with a pricing mechanism that pays out a dividend to residents.

Have you seen that in studies you've done yourself? I know that the most recent study that just came out a few weeks ago from a past chief policy adviser to the Harper government pointed this out very clearly.

[Judy O'Leary]

Yes, we certainly have. In the United States, where they've been doing a lot of work on this, there have been quite a lot of studies on this already. Mark Cameron's work is the first really good analysis on the Canadian system, but the American work and our organization have shown this data for quite some time.

Did you want to add to that?

[Laura Sacks]

Lower-income Canadians have a lower carbon footprint, and if a dividend is distributed equally, it actually helps those lower-income Canadians adjust to any rising prices and have a little bit extra left over at the end so they can use that to make better choices.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

We keep talking about that it's going to have such a devastating impact on our economy, but in actual fact, it was revenue-neutral in B.C. up until very recently and B.C. had the fastest-growing economy while its carbon emissions were being reduced dramatically. Is that not a perfect case in point as to the actual positive impact that mechanism can have?

[Judy O'Leary]

Yes, and there has been some recent work done by one of our members, David Maenz, who is a university instructor in Saskatchewan. In the book I gave Mr. Aldag, he compared Saskatchewan and B.C. over the same time period. Saskatchewan, which had no carbon price in place, saw a huge increase in its fossil fuel consumption, with emissions rising, and B.C. saw the exact opposite. Both of their GDPs were relatively stable in that time, growing a little bit. It's a great comparison.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I'm sure you've seen this graph that came out recently from Australia and the impact this had. Its carbon emissions were increasing on a plane like this, and when it put a price on pollution, its emissions dropped off precipitously over that two-year period. As soon as it eliminated that price on pollution, its emissions all of a sudden spiked in a drastic manner over the last two years. Is that not a perfect example of the impact a price on pollution can have?

[Laura Sacks]

That's a perfect example of why long-term price signalling is really important. One of the things I didn't get a chance to say was that in jurisdictions like the U.K., they've agreed to make climate policy a non-partisan issue and to use a certain method to reduce emissions and get on with it, so that it's not flip-flopping with a strong policy that is then removed. We want to build bridges between parties so that we can have long-term certainty in a carbon price.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Doesn't that also go to the idea that you really need to focus not just on one mechanism? When we're trying to achieve our climate goals, we need a multi-faceted regulatory approach, investing in transit, innovation and green energy, emissions reductions and water and sewers to ensure we are using waste energy and not just allowing methane to escape.

One silver bullet is not going to solve this. There's a lot of talk that a price on pollution is going to be a waste of time. We know that by itself it's not the solution. We need to have a multi-faceted approach to this.

[Judy O'Leary]

Yes, I would agree. I would direct you again to Ecofiscal's work. They've done a wonderful analysis on the complementary policies. They looked at when we need policies other than carbon pricing, and they've done a really good analysis on what it costs the economy.

For example, on electric cars, they did some analysis and they concluded that a quota for dealers works a lot better than a subsidy. It costs the government way less money and you get way more take-up on electric cars. That's one example, but they've done a really detailed analysis of what other things you should use to complement carbon pricing.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Would you agree with the statement that if people are allowed to pollute for free, they will pollute freely?

[Judy O'Leary]

Yes.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you.

Mr. Warawa is next.