I think that's a struggle that every government is having in the whole world, at the level of the nation, the province, the region or municipality. How do we act more quickly?
My feeling is that we have moved away from a paradigm of emissions reduction, where we've been for 30 years and where we had the luxury of just reducing emissions by a certain amount and the world would have been fine. Collectively, at the level of the world, we didn't move quickly enough, so we're forced now into an emissions elimination paradigm. That removes options from the table for us.
This isn't about what sector can reduce the most cheaply so that we get to a certain reduction: every sector has to drive to zero. I think changing from this emissions reduction to an emissions elimination paradigm also changes the onus of leadership. This is not just about Environment and Climate Change Canada anymore. Frankly, it's about every federal department, agency, crown, province, territory, municipal government—and, I'm going to say, especially the private sector too.
In the private sector are the ones that are actually going to invest. The philosophy for decades has been collectively looking to Environment and Climate Change Canada to say, “Make it worth our while so that we can invest.” That paradigm will not work anymore in an emissions-elimination paradigm. Frankly, I believe the private sector has to inspect how they make decisions, how they contribute to developing policy and regulation and how they contribute to developing investable projects that are aligned with a net-zero society.
I think it's very much a question not of what the government can do but of what everyone can do, especially the private sector.