Trudeau government’s latest climate change targets a fantasy

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We’ve reached the point where everything the Trudeau government says about Canada reaching its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets should be discounted.

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First, because the targets are unachievable and the fact that no Canadian government – Liberal or Conservative – has ever achieved an emission reduction target it set for itself starting in 1988.

Second, because the chances of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals being around to have to account for their missed targets are between slim and none.

Third, because given that reality, what the Trudeau Liberals appear to be doing is creating increasingly unrealistic emission targets so they can blame the Conservatives for not achieving them, once they’re in power and the Liberals are in opposition.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault announced last week that Canada’s new target for reducing Canada’s emissions is to cut them by 45% to 50% compared to 2005 levels by 2035.

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Ostensibly, this updates the government’s current target of reducing emissions to 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030.

But what it actually means is that the Trudeau government has given itself five more years to achieve a 45% reduction by 2035, instead of 2030.

That’s why the government’s new target was criticized by environmental activists, who noted its own net zero advisory panel recommended that Canada’s 2035 target should have been to cut emissions by 50% to 55% below 2005 levels.

The problem is that all of these targets are unachievable because, as of 2022, the latest year for which government data are available, Canada’s emissions were just 7.1% below 2005 levels.

That means the Trudeau government has achieved 17.8% of its minimum target of reducing Canada’s emissions to 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 since being elected nine years ago and now has just six years to achieve the remaining 82.2%.

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In fact, Canada’s emissions in 2022, at 708 million tonnes, went up from 698 million tonnes in 2021 – a 1.3% increase – meaning the government is moving further away from its targets rather than closer to them.

Guilbeault blamed the provinces – see Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario – for a lack of cooperation in reducing emissions.

But the fact the Trudeau government continues to announce unrealistic targets on top of unrealistic targets, raises the reasonable suspicion that it is laying the ground work for its defeat in the next election that has be held by Oct. 20 and sooner if there’s a snap election.

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If, as widely expected, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives win a majority government in that election, the Liberals will then claim, in opposition, that they had a plan to meet Canada’s emission targets which the Conservatives abandoned by scrapping Trudeau’s carbon tax, as Poilievre has promised to do.

This argument will be nonsense, because the Liberals have never had a realistic plan to achieve their unrealistic emission targets.

That is the shell game the Liberals have been playing with Canadians on emissions since they were elected in 2015, all of it to justify Trudeau’s carbon tax which, on April 1, will increase by 19% to $95 per tonne of emissions, up from its current $80 per tonne, on its way to $170 per tonne in 2030.

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A report released last month by federal environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco that audited the Liberals’ Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act concluded the government’s lack of transparency in implementing this legislation made it impossible for the average citizen to understand, much less believe, the Trudeau government’s emission targets.

For example, when DeMarco’s auditors examined 20 of the government’s 149 measures to reduce emissions, it found only nine were on track to achieve their goals, while nine others were faced with challenges and two had encountered significant barriers, such as delays in setting and meeting targets.

It also found examples where two different government programs were funding the same projects and reporting the same expected emission reductions, raising the possibility of double counting actual reductions.

In addition, “recent decreases to projected 2030 emissions were not due to climate action taken by governments, but were instead because of revisions to the data used in modelling.”

DeMarco also noted that the modelling used to estimate the emission reductions of various government programs wasn’t updated in 2023 compared to 2022 and that some of the initial calculations were overly optimistic.

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