Environment Committee on Oct. 16th, 2018

[Mark Warawa]

Leona has it.

[The Chair]

Okay, Ms. Alleslev, go ahead.

[Leona Alleslev]

Well, thank you very much, and thank you very much for being here today.

I wonder if I could take a slightly different tack. There are things the government is proposing for carbon taxes and stuff like that, but we also have a number of laws, environmental protection acts, that are not being enforced. I'm wondering if you could give us a feel for your perspective on how the government is doing in enforcing environmental regulations and the impact this enforcement is having on pollutants and climate change.

[Judy O'Leary]

Obviously, we need to enforce the regulations we have, but I think it's outside the scope of our expertise to know how well the government is doing on that. Our focus is on greenhouse gas emissions.

One of our concerns, at the national and provincial level, is that the governments are not doing a good enough job in making sure they're covering all the pollutants. Methane is a great example. There is a proposal for regulations to bring this down 45%, but the governments of this country haven't done a good enough job at measuring the baseline level, so what do we compare to?

For example, the B.C. and federal governments are really pushing LNG, liquefied natural gas. We don't know the baseline emissions of methane. We have not pushed to see how we can get those down. This will use up most of the greenhouse gas emission quota in B.C. over the years. It's a huge problem, so you're quite right that we have to enforce our regulations. We have to make sure we know what the pollutants are, and we have to make sure we regulate and enforce.

[Leona Alleslev]

I was actually referring to exactly what you're saying around emissions, around diesel greenhouse gas emissions. Volkswagen had a device that allowed them to cheat and produce emissions up to 35 times greater than our regulatory standard allows, yet three years later the government still hasn't laid any charges or done anything to ensure that those emissions have been remedied, that Volkswagen is not cheating, and that other people aren't cheating, either. That type of thing is pretty significant.

Even if you don't have all the data, what do you think about that? Is this something the government should be prioritizing, perhaps even as much as other things?

[Judy O'Leary]

I don't know if I would set it as a priority, but of course I would like to see no one cheating.

[Leona Alleslev]

All right, fair enough.

The other thing is that you talk about reducing emissions, but we also talked about fires and the impacts we're seeing on climate change right now. Whether or not the government is successful in Paris, whether or not we achieve 2020 targets and 2030 targets—do you feel what we're doing will change the current climate so that we won't have the increase in floods, or is our purpose to prevent even greater apocalyptic-type climate situations?

[Laura Sacks]

I'll take that.

First of all, Canada's 2030 target is equivalent to a three-degree to four-degree warming if all other countries in the world had a target like ours.

[Leona Alleslev]

If all other—

[Laura Sacks]

Our target is less ambitious than those of many other countries. That's one point. We produce a relatively small amount of emissions, you might say. We learned just recently that—

[Leona Alleslev]

If other countries don't—

[Laura Sacks]

—35 other countries have a small amount of emissions, so it's not insignificant. If everybody used the excuse that they were small, then we would.... Every little bit counts. It's a complex problem, as we were just being told, and all of our emissions are important, so I'm not going to discount Canada's role.

If Paris is successful and all the countries of the world come together to keep warming below two degrees, striving towards one-and-a-half degrees, we are still going to have fires and floods until we can start taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are some scientists who think there are ways to do this through forestry, agriculture and technology. They think that in the second half of the century we can start reducing the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and then lower those risks, but we are in it right now, and we can't just stop the boat.

[Leona Alleslev]

Fair enough.

[Laura Sacks]

We're not saying that pricing carbon is going to stop wildfires.

[Leona Alleslev]

The question is, what impact will Canada's achieving targets in 2030 have if China and Russia—the overwhelming majority in the world—do not take similar action?

[Laura Sacks]

That's a really good question, and that's where we really need Canadian leadership and that of other countries of the world. It's a moral question.

[Leona Alleslev]

Is it reasonable to think that Canada can lead China and the United States, who are responsible, I think, between the two of them, for upwards of 75% of global emissions? If so, at what cost? We're looking at a cost to our economy that will make us less competitive in our significant GDP category. What is the cost versus the return, and what is our contribution?

[Laura Sacks]

One thing as far as costs go is that if Canada is an innovative leader, we can sell our technology. China is in it seriously. It has a strong motivation to decrease its emissions for its own security, as well as its own economic growth.

[The Chair]

With that, we were going to go back to the Liberals for a brief round of questioning, but given that we have four minutes left, I'm going to turn it all over to Mr. Stetski to take us to the 5:30 mark.

[Wayne Stetski]

I'd like to thank my colleagues for allowing this to happen today. I'm very happy to have Laura and Judy here.

In 2007, I got a cheque in the mail from the B.C. government, which set a positive tone for bringing in the tax in 2008. It's now been in place for 10 years in British Columbia. We were accountable for our emissions. I was with the provincial government, and we had to account for every kilometre that we drove. There was, in essence, a cost to claiming that.

In the next phase, the government was taking the money and putting it into a green fund. People with ideas that would help the environment and help reduce CO2 could apply for it and put that money to good use, so that was a second version of the model. In 2008, they also reduced taxes in such a way that there was a net neutral cost to people, so it was a carbon tax, yes, but they reduced other taxes to offset the carbon tax.

Then we went to this green project model. When I was mayor of Cranbrook, we were supposed to write a cheque for $60,000 to the province to cover our CO2 costs. They agreed that if we could demonstrate we were putting that $60,000 to use to improve energy, etc., in our communities, it was a worthwhile thing to do and we didn't have to write the cheque. It was all about incentives to reduce CO2.

In the model you prefer, having looked at a number of models, are you talking about returning an equitable amount to every Canadian? Is this why people who have a lower income would benefit, so that a person who is making a million dollars a year and a person making $20,000 a year would get the same amount of money in their rebate cheque? What is the model you actually prefer?

[Laura Sacks]

That's the pure carbon fee and dividend model that CCL has been advocating for. Again, there is a lot of fine tuning. British Columbia fine-tuned a lot of things, from corporate tax cuts to rural and northern rebates. There are many different models, and that's the one CCL has been advocating for.

I just wanted to mention, too, that as far as B.C.'s carbon tax goes, if we got rid of the carbon tax today, corporate and other business tax rates would go up right away, so we would be hearing screaming from a lot of businesses. We also have our personal income tax, where the lower two brackets have been cut; those tax rates would go up. I don't think people who are attacking B.C.'s carbon tax necessarily understand that their taxes would be going up.

[Wayne Stetski]

The way you implement it is really important, both in terms of public acceptance and also benefit or cost to the economy.

[Judy O'Leary]

I think perception is very important. Depending on how you roll this out, people will see it differently. If you're not transparent enough, it doesn't work very well.

[Laura Sacks]

Seeing the money as a rebate cheque is a reminder to people where that money is going. It won't be considered a tax grab if you're seeing a cheque in the mail or a debit on your chequing account, a positive debit. It's the wrong way around, a positive debit or whatever that's called.

[Wayne Stetski]

Thank you for coming all the way from Nelson. I appreciate that.