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After years of being misled by false claims from Canada’s Liberal government that its targets to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions to address climate change were achievable, we can no longer trust it.

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In 2023, then-federal environment minister Steven Guilbault boasted that the Justin Trudeau government was committing more than $200 billion of taxpayers’ money to 149 programs spread across 13 government departments to reduce Canada’s emissions.

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Despite this massive expenditure, the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI), the leading domestic monitor of government efforts to reduce emissions, said earlier this month that the federal target of reducing annual emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels in 2030 is out of reach.

As of 2024, the CCI estimates, Canada’s emissions were just 8.5% below 2005 levels – the same level as in 2023, according to the latest federal government data, always reported two years after the fact.

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This means government efforts to reduce emissions are stalled and will at best achieve only half of the 2030 target, according to the CCI.

Given the government’s failing efforts to date, even that seems optimistic.

What is needed, but what Canadians won’t get from the Mark Carney government, is a forensic audit into how spending more than $200 billion by the federal government, not including additional spending by the provinces and municipalities, failed to deliver what was promised.

The auditor general, environment commissioner and parliamentary budget officer have all reported major flaws in federal climate programs.

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These failures also mean the government’s emission reduction targets of at least 45% compared to 2005 in 2035 and net zero in 2050 are unachievable, unsurprising given that no Canadian government has ever met an  emissions reduction target since 1988.

It’s the same globally, with this year’s authoritative Production Gap Report compiled by a coalition of environmental agencies and the United Nations environmental program reporting recently that global emissions are 120% above the level needed to avert what the UN says will be catastrophic climate change – up from 110% in 2023.

Clearly, the tactic of everyone from the Canadian government to the UN of trying to frighten us into supporting costly and failed programs to reduce emissions isn’t working.

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While our Liberal government continues to insist that not supporting its ineffective emission reduction measures is climate denialism, the reality is that growing numbers of Canadians have logically come to dismiss the government’s specious claim that paying more taxes in Canada will result in less severe weather in Canada.

As the parliamentary budget office has noted, our emissions are too small to materially affect global climate change.

In fact, emissions in the developed world, including Canada, are mostly flat or falling, while emissions in the developing world are increasing.

Political leaders should have realized decades ago that addressing climate change through imposed, top-down policies of scarcity – that people must lower their standard of living by paying more money to governments to make hurricanes, floods, droughts and heat waves less severe – was absurd and ineffective.

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A sensible thing the federal government could do is to dramatically increase the budget for adapting to climate change, since making public and private infrastructure more resilient to severe weather – whatever the cause – will reduce the financial costs and human toll of natural disasters.

The federal government has committed more than $8 billion to this effort.

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But severe weather resiliency should be at the top of every “nation building” project the Carney government green lights, especially the development of a national, reliable east-to-west coast clean electricity corridor powered mainly by nuclear reactors, hydro and natural gas, capable of supplying the enormous amount of new electricity generation we will need to power artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.

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For fans of wind and solar power, natural gas will be needed to back them up because their power is intermittent.

Some of the money to help pay for this can be diverted from the many failed federal climate programs.

The most effective thing Canada can do to lower emissions globally is to replace coal-fired electricity with natural gas, since natural gas burns at half the carbon intensity of coal and many developing countries, unlike Canada, rely heavily on coal for their energy needs.

While Canada now has one liquified natural gas plant – LNG Canada in Kitimat, B.C. – shipping our natural gas to global markets, instead of being captive at a discount price to the U.S., it only began operating in June.

Other projects are in development, but Canada endured a lost decade of economic opportunity under the Liberal government from 2015-25, which wrongly assured us the age of fossil fuels was over, even as foreign leaders came to Canada begging us to sell them our natural gas.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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