Our choice is between, on the one hand, a just and managed transition to a lower-carbon economy or, alternatively, an unplanned collapse reminiscent of so many previous resource busts. The status quo, especially when it comes to oil and gas production, is simply not tenable in the long term.
How do we achieve this transition? Well, there are four key pieces to focus on.
First, when we talk about the energy transition, we need to stop talking about emissions reductions in the abstract and be clear about the end goal. To meet our domestic and international climate commitments by 2050—and I will be less diplomatic than my colleagues here—there can be no fossil fuel industry in Canada. Full stop.
The question is, what are we doing now that sets us up for that future? To date, the Government of Canada has focused a lot on scaling up the clean economy, and that's good, but it has hesitated to map out a plan for the fossil fuel industry. In contrast, with the coal transition, the government set a deadline of 2030. That clear timeline was essential, not only for environmental reasons but also because it gave affected workers, their communities and the industry certainty about the future. It allowed them to plan. We can’t plan for 2050 if we don’t have a clear sense of what that future looks like.
The second key piece is that when we talk about the energy transition, we need to recognize that there are actually two transitions happening here. There's the transition out of fossil fuels, which disproportionately impacts those workers and communities who depend on it, and then there's the transition into a cleaner economy that takes place in every community across the country.
It’s a myth that our fossil fuel workforce will transition into our clean economy workforce. Many coal, oil and natural gas workers today are going to do their jobs until retirement or else transition into jobs outside of the energy industry. In contrast, most people working in green jobs in 10 years will never have worked in the fossil fuel sector. We need very different sets of policies to support these two categories of transition, which affect different kinds of workers in different parts of the country.
The third key piece, to borrow a phrase from my colleague Seth Klein, is that Canada needs to “Spend what it takes to win.” Transitioning the economy off of a $100-billion-a-year export industry while at the same time trying to decarbonize every other sector will, of course, be extremely expensive. The recent federal budget estimated that to achieve net-zero emissions, we need to be spending an extra $100 billion to $125 billion a year to achieve net zero in Canada.
Although it's not the federal government's responsibility on its own to make up that gap, the government does need to be spending a lot more to accelerate this transition, especially with investments that are targeted at the communities and regions that currently depend on oil and gas. They need alternatives.
The fourth and final point is that for a truly equitable transition, we need to look beyond—