Of the 10 potential candidates identified in news reports so far, at least three can claim credentials in some aspect of climate response or energy transition, while another three are seen to be more closely aligned with fossil fuel interests. Depending on which of those voices show up in the campaign, one veteran observer says a lukewarm Liberal response could open the door for the New Democratic Party to regain ground on climate change and energy.

In his statement Monday morning, Trudeau asked Governor General Mary Simon to prorogue Parliament until March 24, declaring that he isn’t the right choice to lead his party into this year’s federal election. The announcement followed months of drama, dissent and cratering public support, culminating in the resignation last month of Finance Minister and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, now considered a top leadership contender. In the wake of Freeland’s announcement, a growing wave of Liberal caucus members prevailed on Trudeau to stand aside.

“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it’s become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau told media.

Those words opened a leadership process that will begin with a six-hour national caucus meeting Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported, then a discussion by the Liberal Party’s national executive, The Globe and Mail said, in the story that broke the news.

Trudeau, who will stay on as PM and Liberal leader until his successor is chosen, made his announcement just two weeks before Donald Trump begins his second term in the White House. Trump greeted the news by doubling down on his mutterings about annexing Canada as a 51st U.S. state – a notion that has already prompted at least one call to defend Canadian sovereignty by standing up for community energy and energy democracy.

CBC has the most complete rundown so far of the potential candidates. They are (in alphabetical order):

• Transport Minister and former Treasury Board president Anita Anand

• Former Liberal MP Frank Baylis

• Mark Carney, a climate finance expert and former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who has never held elected office but is reportedly making the rounds to pitch his candidacy to the Liberal caucus

• Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who’s been at the forefront of efforts to promote Canada as a destination for clean energy investment

• Former British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, a relentless advocate for her province’s liquefied natural gas industry while she was in office

• Freeland, once referred to as Trudeau’s “Minister of Everything” and long touted as a future leadership candidate

• Government House Leader Karina Gould

• Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly

• Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who stepped in as interim finance minister when Freeland resigned and once saw fit to consult the federal ethics commissioner over his ties to New Brunswick’s powerful Irving Oil empire

• Natural Resources and Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, a former environment and climate minister who ran a cleantech firm before he entered politics

Fernando Melo, federal director of policy and government affairs at the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA), declined to comment on individual candidates’ track records or future prospects. But “anyone who has served in the Liberal government has shown a remarkable understanding of the role of renewable energy and energy storage in accelerating Canada’s economy, and in a moment of affordability, helping to reduce costs for all Canadians,” he says.

CanREA has “a really open door engaging with all the parties right now,” he adds. Whichever one forms the next government, “the big question will be how we ensure that Canada remains an attractive place to invest capital” while provinces carry through with the now 13,000 megawatts of clean electricity they’re in the process of procuring.

“It’s a competitive market for investment, and it’s not just Canada that needs new renewable electricity and storage. The globe does,” Melo says. “So whoever forms a government needs to think long and hard about how we continue those things.”

Tyler Meredith, a former policy director to Freeland and founding partner of Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips policy advisers, says that climate and energy issues would more likely come to the surface in a longer leadership campaign that ran 90 to 100 days, with time for policy debates on different topics across all the regions of the country. A shorter calendar – dictated by the prorogation date of March 24, and the likelihood that the government will fall to a non-confidence motion immediately afterwards – would “leave very little time to have a really rich policy debate.”

But all of the candidates will be looking for ways to differentiate themselves, Meredith says, from each other and from Trudeau – and for some of them, that will mean focusing on energy and environment.

In spite of the Conservative opposition holding a 25-point lead over the Liberals – and Trudeau carrying a -43 net favourability rating – in the aftermath of Freeland’s resignation, Meredith stresses that all the leadership candidates will be running for government, not opposition. “Don’t discount the possibility that this leadership race has the effect of potentially energizing things,” he says.

Climate Emergency Unit team lead Seth Klein says that the Liberal leadership race could also open up an opportunity for the NDP – particularly if the winning candidate is Clark, whose provincial climate-action plan was literally written (or, at least, rewritten) in the boardroom of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or Freeland, long seen as the biggest obstacle to more ambitious climate action in the Trudeau cabinet.

“If you are a climate voter, you’re much more likely to have seen the Liberal Party as the strongest on climate over the last few years, whereas the NDP ranks at the same level as the Conservatives,” Klein says, mainly because “you never heard about climate” from NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. But if the Liberals choose a leader who looks to be shifting its priorities in a different direction, “that would open up space for the NDP to pick up the banner.”

In a release Monday afternoon, Climate Action Network Canada said that Trudeau “accomplished more on climate policy than any other Canadian Prime Minister so far,” leading “a revolution in how we tackle climate change” that still fell short of what the country needed.

“The resulting policies have contributed to, and will continue, improving the lives of people and communities,” executive director Caroline Brouillette said. But “we have seen that no climate approach will be successful without dismantling the fossil fuel industry’s grip on Canada’s policy and politics.”

This article originally appeared in The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

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DeSmog’s analysis of Westminster’s influential Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) found that two-thirds of its supporters are no longer represented in Parliament following the July 4 general election.

Twenty-four of the 37 MPs supportive of the backbench grouping were voted out – a loss of 65% of its backers. Outgoing supporters include former energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, former NZSG co-chair Steve Baker and Net Zero Watch board member Andrea Jenkyns.

A further five stood down or resigned before the election, among them veteran climate denier John Redwood.

The group’s former chair Craig Mackinlay, who contracted sepsis in September, has been appointed to the House of Lords by outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak. Mackinlay has said he would use this platform to campaign for “sensible net zero.”

The NZSG has actively campaigned against climate action since it was formed in 2021. The group’s joint letters to the Telegraph made front-page news, as supporters urged the government to scrap “environmental levies on domestic energy,” “expand North Sea exploration” for oil and gas, and support “shale gas extraction” by lifting the ban on fracking.

In addition to the NZSG grouping, former prime minister Liz Truss, who has become an outspoken critic of net-zero since leaving Downing Street in 2022, was voted out on Thursday.

Campaigners have welcomed the departure of MPs opposed to climate action. “This landslide election victory has buried Sunak’s anti-green agenda once and for all, along with many of its principle architects,” Will McCallum, co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, told DeSmog.

“Most of the former MPs who sought to sow division and disinformation about net zero have lost at the ballot box.”

Meanwhile, 14 anti-net-zero MPs were re-elected, including Labour MP Graham Stringer, who is on the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the U.K.’s main climate denial group, and Lee Anderson, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK earlier this year.

Four new Reform MPs were also elected, including party leader Nigel Farage and chairman Richard Tice, both of whom have a record of climate science denial.

Despite this, campaigners are still positive. McCallum added that “the biggest winners [in the election] – Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party – contested this election on strong green policies that will slash emissions, lower bills, and deliver hundreds of thousands of new jobs.”

“There is and has long been a public consensus on climate action in this country,” he said, and “the new government should feel empowered to be bold.”

Here are some of the most prominent critics of net-zero who have lost their seats:

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lost his North East Somerset seat by more than 6,000 votes to Labour’s Dan Norris, was secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy under Liz Truss between September and October 2022.

While in office he reportedly argued for lifting the ban on fracking for shale gas and told the head of the U.A.E.’s state investment company, in a private meeting revealed by DeSmog, that people need to “stop demonising oil and gas.”

Since January 2023, Rees-Mogg has presented his own show on GB News, which regularly broadcasts climate science denial. Rees-Mogg has been a harsh critic of the government’s net-zero policies, stating that “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions.”

Steve Baker

Steve Baker has led the charge against climate policies in Parliament. Baker was a trustee of the U.K.’s main climate denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), from May 2021 to September 2022, when he stepped down to serve as Northern Ireland minister. He was co-chair of the NZSG, which operated as the GWPF’s caucus in Parliament.

At a 2021 Conservative Party conference event, Baker said that much climate science is “contestable” and “sometimes propagandised” while claiming that some UN climate scenarios were “implausible.”

In February 2022, Baker received £5,000, and a further £10,000 in February 2023, from Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF.

On Thursday, Baker lost his Wycombe seat to Labour’s Emma Reynolds by more than 4,000 votes.

Dame Andrea Jenkyns 

Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her seat of Leeds and South West Morley by more than 7,000 votes to Labour’s Mark Sewards, sits on the board of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the GWPF, the U.K.’s main climate science denial group.

In March 2023, Jenkyns told Parliament: “Personally, net zero, I think we need to ditch these targets, especially at the moment, and use whatever resources we’ve got under our feet.” She has described herself on Twitter as holding “no-to-net-zero views.”

Miriam Cates

Miriam Cates lost her Penistone and Stocksbridge seat by more than 9,000 votes to Labour’s Marie Tidball in Thursday’s general election.

Cates was tipped as a rising star of the Conservative party, a “darling” of the Tory right. She is the co-chair of the New Conservatives, a socially conservative faction of the Tory party which received £50,000 in January from GB News investors the Legatum Group.

Cates also sits on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a right-wing group fronted by prominent climate denier Jordan Peterson.

Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in London last year, Cates suggested that “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” are being caused by teaching children that “humanity is killing the Earth.”

Philip Davies

Philip Davies, who lost his Shipley seat by more than 8,000 votes to Labour’s Anna Dixon, has a long record of opposing climate policies. Davies was one of only five MPs to vote against the U.K.’s Climate Change Act in 2008.

He currently works as a presenter for GB News, as does his wife and fellow Conservative politician Esther McVey, who was re-elected on Thursday.

Liz Truss

A number of net-zero-skeptic MPs existed outside the NZSG grouping, among them the former prime minister Liz Truss, who resigned in October 2022 after just 49 days in the job. As well as appointing Rees-Mogg energy secretary, Truss overturned the U.K.’s moratorium on fracking for shale gas – a key demand from the Net Zero Scrutiny Group.

Since leaving Downing Street – and in between giving paid speeches to U.S. anti-climate groups like CPAC and the Heritage Foundation – Truss has become an open opponent of net-zero policies.

In her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West, Truss called for the independent Climate Change Committee to be abolished and attacked the UN COP process, which coordinates international action on climate change. Truss also claimed that while in cabinet she argued against the U.K. hosting the COP26 climate summit.

On Thursday, Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat by 630 votes to Labour’s Terry Jermy.

‘Watching Closely’

“It’s obviously fantastic news that 30 Tory MPs who’ve lobbied against climate policies are no longer in Parliament,” said Jessica Townsend, founder of the MP Watch campaign group, which used DeSmog research in a recent event on “top ten climate denial MPs.”

Townsend noted that seven of the campaign’s list have won seats, including Reform’s Farage and GWPF director Graham Stringer.

“MP Watch will be watching these MPs closely in coming months, as well as the influence fossil fuel companies and their think tanks may have on Labour in Westminster now that the power base has shifted,” she added.

This article by DeSmog is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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Although Canada’s elected officials say they’re embracing that urgency, the policies adopted by various levels of government to date haven’t supported the fundamental and rapid transition needed to decarbonize our energy system.

A recent study by my research team at the University of Victoria found that policy documents of successive provincial and federal governments all say they aspire to a low-carbon energy transition. However, many policies intended to drive the low-carbon transition are actually just reinforcing fossil fuels by supporting the wrong kinds of innovations. Our research led us to the conclusion that Canada is locking itself into continued reliance on fossil fuels through policies that encourage incrementalism, rather than the transformative change we need. 

The scorecard tool we developed uses a scale of -2 to +2 to evaluate an innovation’s potential to decarbonize, democratize and decentralize energy systems. Policy-makers and investors can use these scorecards to inform their decisions about which innovations to support and which to discourage. Negative scores mean that the innovation is reinforcing the energy system’s path dependency on fossil fuels. A score of zero means that the innovation is reinforcing the status quo, and a score of +1 means that the innovation is providing incremental shifts toward reducing fossil fuel use, giving consumers more control, for example, by putting solar panels on rooftops. Innovations that receive a score of +1, however, are not transformative enough to address the climate emergency in the short timeframe that we need to. A score of +2 means that the innovation has the potential to disrupt the energy system by replacing fossil fuels, give communities more collective control over energy decisions, and decentralize energy grids.

Our study reached out to hundreds of policy-makers, energy and environment experts and advocates in Ontario to help us identify low-carbon innovations available to energy users. We identified more than 130 innovations offered over the last 20 years, including cooperatively owned solar panels, micro-grids, energy planning in Indigenous communities, electric vehicles, all the way down to replacing natural gas appliances and supplying new housing with natural gas. 

We also identified the policies and stakeholders that support them. We found that innovations with a high potential to decarbonize, such as electric vehicles and zero-carbon buildings, had less uptake. In contrast, the most popular economic policies support innovations that reinforce the fossil fuel regime, such as high-efficiency natural gas furnaces. For instance, Ontario cancelled both its feed-in-tariff program for renewable energy development and its cap and trade program and instead is choosing to expand the natural gas system to serve additional homes. 

We found that having the support of a wide range of stakeholders, such as policy-makers, advocates and industry, facilitates the diffusion of more innovations that disrupt the fossil fuel system. The more public discourse there is to support innovations with greater disruptive potential, the higher the possibility that policies and the instruments that support them will be developed. And if we give communities and municipalities more control over their energy systems, they are better able to deploy renewable energy and other decarbonizing innovations. 

In other words, the best low-carbon innovations decarbonize, democratize and decentralize.

We developed a scorecard tool to evaluate an innovation’s potential to decarbonize. Policy-makers and investors can use these scorecards to inform decisions around which innovations to support and which to discourage.

Canada’s state of carbon lock-in is making it hard to transition. Our policies, infrastructures, technologies and behaviours all reinforce continued fossil fuel use and inhibit the uptake of decarbonizing technologies. Many of the low-cost and commercially viable low-carbon innovations required to meet crucial greenhouse-gas-reduction targets already exist yet are being implemented much too slowly. Only four of these – solar PV, energy efficient lighting, data centres and networks, and electric vehicles – are penetrating markets sufficiently, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

A low-carbon energy transition means switching things such as heating and transportation to run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, combined with rapid and massive deployment of low-carbon sources of renewable energy. It also requires energy users – households, businesses and even public institutions – to participate in energy systems in many new ways, such as putting solar panels on their roofs or driving electric vehicles. Collectively, by adopting innovations that decarbonize, democratize and decentralize at a large market share, energy users can disrupt the energy system to propel us toward a net-zero world. 

As a Liberal minority government is sworn in in the coming weeks, it will quickly need to ramp up its greenhouse-gas-cutting policies, with the UN’s landmark climate change summit in Glasgow, COP26, rapidly approaching. Canada needs its policy-makers to respond to the climate crisis by focusing their efforts on the wide range of innovations we can harness to decarbonize our economy. But they must also take care that policies don’t work against the goal of a fossil-free transition for Canada.

Christina Hoicka is an associate professor in geography and civil engineering at the University of Victoria.

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Each would maintain an increasing carbon price for large greenhouse gas emitters, including fossil-fuelled power plants. They all want more electricity production from our abundant renewable energy resources, and more sharing of it between regions. And they’ve all proposed initiatives that would drive electrification in sectors currently powered mainly by other energy sources, including passenger vehicle transportation and industrial hydrogen production.  

This high-level consensus represents important progress. But whatever government takes office after the election will need to move quickly to implement and expand upon these commitments if Canada is to successfully meet its emission reduction targets.  

Renewables at the core of our ambitions

Renewable electricity must be at the core of these efforts. In Canada today, we have the tremendous advantage of an electricity supply that is already almost 70% from renewable energy resources. And there is vast undeveloped potential within our flowing inland and marine waters, blowing wind, and shining sun. It’s an enviable starting point.

Moving to fully decarbonize electricity production is critical and within reach in Canada, and we need to do so well before 2050. We then need to expand our use of this invaluable resource, because electricity meets only about one-fifth of Canada’s total final energy needs today.

Renewable electricity will be instrumental in displacing more of the polluting fuels that currently meet the other four-fifths of our final energy. This means we need to dramatically and rapidly ramp up generating capacity. Numerous studies have shown that by 2050 we will need to produce two to three times as much clean power as we do currently.

There are countless potential renewable electricity generation, storage and transmission projects in Canada. A number are already in development and ready to proceed rapidly.  

They include wave and tidal energy on our coasts, hydropower refurbishment and development, new wind and solar generation across the country, and more transmission lines and energy storage to knit it all together. The development, construction and operation of such projects will require significant investment and a very large skilled workforce and will provide significant opportunities for Indigenous communities across the country. Successfully moving to the scale required from a climate change perspective, however, requires swift action. 

A critically important leadership opportunity

Leadership, it is sometimes suggested, involves finding a parade and getting in front of it. The renewable electricity parade is already marching forward, with a great many Canadians cheering it on. Getting in front of it and sustaining its momentum will be a critically important job for whatever government is sworn in later this year. 

That leadership needs to entail maintaining Canada’s long-standing commitments to phase out coal-fired electricity and to work toward a 90%-non-emitting electricity grid by 2030, with full elimination of electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions well before 2050.  

It also must involve encouraging rapid investments in new renewable electricity generation, storage and transmission to both enhance Canada’s future economic competitiveness and meet climate policy objectives. The Canadian Institute for Climate Choices has identified such investments as “safe bets” that will be required on any pathway to significant emission reductions. 

Our post-election leaders must give investors increased certainty by providing a transparent schedule for increased carbon pricing at an accelerating pace that prices-in the impact of emitting generation and solidifies the business case for non-emitting alternatives. They will also need to work with the  provinces and territories to design and implement comprehensive plans to electrify key energy uses and streamline regulatory review and approvals processes for renewable energy projects while maintaining environmental protections. 

In the remaining days of this short campaign, we can indeed take satisfaction from the emerging consensus around Canada’s clean-energy future. But we should also be asking all leaders and candidates pointed questions about their readiness to turn vision into action, and about their keenness to get in front of this ready-made parade. 

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin, Robert Hornung and Elisa Obermann are the leaders of the Canadian Council on Renewable Electricity (CanCORE), a collaborative initiative of Canada’s national trade associations for the water, wind, solar and marine energy sectors. These sectors produce 68% of Canada’s total annual electricity.

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As the country’s need for power grows through the decarbonization of transportation, industry and space heating, the Liberal Party climate plan is proposing a clean energy standard to help Canada achieve a 100% net-zero-electricity system by 2035. 

The proposal echoes a report released August 19 by the David Suzuki Foundation and a group of environmental NGOs that also calls for a clean electricity standard, capping power-sector emissions, and tighter carbon-pricing regulations. The report, written by Simon Fraser University climate economist Mark Jaccard and data analyst Brad Griffin, asserts that these policies would effectively decarbonize Canada’s electricity system by 2035.

“Fuel switching from dirty fossil fuels to clean electricity is an essential part of any serious pathway to transition to a net-zero energy system by 2050,” writes Tom Green, climate policy advisor to the Suzuki Foundation, in a foreword to the report. The pathway to a net-zero grid is even more important as Canada switches from fossil fuels to electric vehicles, space heating and industrial processes.

While the NDP and Greens also call for a net-zero grid by 2030 (five years earlier than the Liberals), only the Liberals have promised to institute a clean electricity standard, which is the specific mechanism under federal law that would permit Ottawa to use regulation and carbon pricing to achieve its target. And while the Conservatives promise to upgrade the grid, their platform doesn’t include a net-zero electricity system target.

Under Jaccard and Griffin’s proposal, a clean electricity standard would be established to regulate CO2 emissions specifically from power plants across Canada. In addition, the plan includes an increase in the carbon price imposed on electricity system releases, combined with tighter regulation to ensure that 100% of the carbon price set by the federal government is charged to electricity producers. The authors propose that the current scheduled carbon price of $170 per tonne of CO2 in 2030 should rise to at least $300 per tonne by 2050.

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the 2030 standard would mean that all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants would require carbon capture in order to comply with the standard. The provinces would be given until 2035 to drop to zero grams CO2 per kilowatt hour, matching the 2030 standard for low-carbon provinces (Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island). 

Alberta and Saskatchewan targeted 

Canada has a relatively clean electricity system, with about 80% of the country’s power generated from low- or zero-emission sources. So the biggest impacts of the proposal will be felt in the higher-carbon provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta has a plan to switch from coal-based electric power to natural gas generation by 2023. But Saskatchewan is still working on its plan. Under the Jaccard-Griffin proposal, these provinces would need to install carbon capture on their gas-fired plants by 2030 and carbon-negative technology (biomass with carbon capture, for instance) by 2035. Saskatchewan has been operating carbon capture and storage technology at its Boundary Dam power station since 2014, but large-scale rollout at power plants has not yet been achieved in Canada. 

With its heavy reliance on nuclear and hydro generation, Ontario’s electricity supply is already low carbon. Natural gas now accounts for about 7% of the province’s grid, but the clean electricity standard could pose a big challenge for the province as it ramps up natural-gas-generated power to replace electricity from its aging Pickering station, scheduled to go out of service in 2025. Pickering currently supplies about 14% of Ontario’s power. 

Ontario doesn’t have large geological basins for underground CO2 storage, as Alberta and Saskatchewan do, so the report says Ontario will have to build up its solar and wind generation significantly or find a solution to capture CO2 from its gas plants. The Ontario Clean Air Alliance has kicked off a campaign to encourage the Ontario government to phase out gas-fired generation by purchasing power from Quebec or installing new solar or wind power.

As the report points out, the federal government has Supreme Court–sanctioned authority to impose carbon regulations, such as a clean electricity standard, and carbon pricing on the provinces.

The federal government can also mandate a national approach to CO2 reduction regardless of fuel source, encouraging higher-carbon provinces to work with their lower-carbon neighbours. The Atlantic provinces would be encouraged to buy power from hydro-heavy Newfoundland, for example, while Ontario would be encouraged to buy power from Quebec, Saskatchewan from Manitoba, and Alberta from British Columbia.

The Canadian Electricity Association, the umbrella organization for Canada’s power sector, did not respond to a request for comment on the Jaccard-Griffin report or the Liberal net-zero grid proposal.

Liberal-NDP battle over climate policy

The proposed clean electricity standard is part of a Liberal-NDP battle over climate policy in the current election campaign, prompted in part by an assessment by Jaccard of the parties’ climate platforms. Jaccard has rated the overall Liberal climate plan as 8/10, which is not surprising given that his own recommendations for carbon pricing and the more recent clean electricity standard are in the plan. At the same time, he ranked the NDP’s climate platform at 2/10, saying it was hobbled by unrealistic burdens on industry to pay for decarbonization.

Ironically, the NDP plan calls for the kind of strong regulation and stringent carbon pricing throughout the economy that Jaccard specifically recommends for the electricity system in his net-zero electricity report.

Just how much more clean power will Canada need? 

The proposal has also kicked off a debate about exactly how much additional electricity Canada will need in coming decades.

In his 2015 report, Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in Canada, energy and climate analyst Chris Bataille estimated that to achieve Canada’s climate net-zero target by 2050 the country will need to double its electricity use by that year.

Jaccard and Griffin agree with this estimate, saying that Canada will need more than 1,200 terawatt hours of electricity per year in 2050, up from about 640 terawatt hours currently.

But energy and climate consultant Ralph Torrie (also director of research at Corporate Knights) disputes this analysis.

He says large-scale programs to make the economy more energy efficient could substantially reduce electricity demand. A major program to install heat pumps and replace inefficient electric heating in homes and businesses could save 50 terawatt hours of consumption on its own, according to a recent report from Torrie and colleague Brendan Haley. 

Put in context, 50 terawatt hours would require generation from 7,500 large wind turbines. Applied to electric vehicle charging, 50 terawatt hours could power 10 million electric vehicles.

While Torrie doesn’t dispute the need to bring the power system to net-zero, he also doesn’t believe the “arm-waving argument that the demand for electricity is necessarily going to double because of the electrification associated with decarbonization.” 

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. 

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The upcoming decade is crucial for avoiding the worst impacts of the climate crisis. This federal election is a critical opportunity to demand that our political leaders listen and act at the scale and speed we know is necessary to address the climate emergency. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underscores, yet again, the urgency to act. 

Despite their reputation for being less likely to vote, young people are not apathetic – millennials are the country’s largest voting bloc. They represent more than 40% of voters in this election – and they have a lot riding on the election outcomes. 

The youth of today know that they will face the burden of tomorrow, and they are seeking to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes that will affect our future. The choices made by policy-makers, governments and leaders today will shape our societies for years to come. It’s vital that young people are given the opportunity and power to co-create the solutions for the future. 

This is the impetus behind the Davos Lab, an initiative of the Global Shapers Community that mobilized more than two million people in 180 nations to develop a youth-driven recovery plan to address the world’s socio-economic and environmental crises. A group of 14,000 young people around the world compiled the ideas behind the plan, released in August. They mobilized interested stakeholders to outline a vision of collective action that will help policy-makers integrate the voices of the next generation into recovery efforts. Such dialogues, led by young people, were also held across Canada, focusing on various topics, including conscious consumerism and accelerating a net-zero transition. 

One of the main issues of concern for youth in Canada and around the globe is the need for a green recovery and meaningful jobs. Job insecurity is on the rise, and young people are unclear about career prospects in this time of uncertainty. The RBC Future Launch study of more than 1,800 Canadians aged 14 to 29, released in March, found that in every province, youth are significantly less confident when it comes to their job prospects and how prepared they are for the future of work. Gen-Z women make up 2.5% of the Canadian labour force but account for 17% of the total decline in employment during the pandemic.

Young people risk being left behind as they are struggling with the youth unemployment crisis. That’s why we’re now calling on all federal political parties to commit to substantial investments in youth-led climate solutions, and skills development. This can also include the creation of a youth climate corps that provides good-paying green public jobs and puts Canadian youth to work. Young people can work toward restoring ecosystems, building community resilience, protecting biodiversity and contributing to care work. Ensuring equitable access to these opportunities will be critical to elevating youth voices in addressing climate change. 

In their 2021 election platform, the Liberals have broadly pledged to invest $8 billion to “accelerate green jobs,” in addition to investments in “youth employment and skills srategy.” The NDP promises to establish a civilian climate corps of young people to create jobs supporting conservation and “build an equitable clean-energy economy.” 

The Green Party platform also references the “creation of a youth climate corps” as part of its green jobs training program, while the Conservative platform does not include a direct mention of green jobs. (Shake Up the Establishment, a youth-led non-profit organization, provides a detailed summary of each party’s climate and environmental promises.) 

We need all federal political parties to embrace a comprehensive strategy that creates pathways for good green jobs for young people, especially those from equity-seeking groups. We also call on all parties to commit to shaping policy in collaboration with youth and invest in youth-led climate solutions, as well as holding companies accountable for environmental harms that jeopardize our future.

The actions being taken to date are not enough: Canada’s climate record is the worst among the G7, as emissions have continued to increase. A society-wide mobilization to address the climate crisis requires transforming our economy – it means reducing emissions rapidly, scaling regenerative business models that do not rely on the exploitation of people and the planet, mobilizing capital toward equitable climate solutions, and ending fossil fuel subsidies. As noted in Canada’s first state of the youth report, released in August 2021, “the climate crisis can only be solved with an overhaul of the system, not individual actions.”

If we are to avoid these pitfalls, we must ensure that we lay a foundation that addresses the systemic issues in our society by investing in young people, as they are the best placed to lead the transition to a more sustainable world. We are quickly becoming the last generation with the ability to slow down the rate of climate change. If today’s politicians want our vote, they must commit to saving our future. 

Puninda Thind is a sustainability professional, climate justice organizer and a Global Shaper passionate about building resilient, sustainable and just communities. Laura Corrales is an ESG consultant, social intrapreneur, Global Shaper and Action Canada Fellow passionate about youth leadership and  systemic change. Robyn Seetal is a CPA, CA, sustainability consultant, and impact investor passionate about adopting  eco-centric leadership as a tool for systemic change. Anoosha Lalani is a CPA and passionate environmentalist interested in the financial impact of ESG issues. 

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The Liberals’ 2021 campaign pledges would undoubtedly provoke renewed battles with conservative-led provinces, and potentially more court challenges from them. The climate plan that Trudeau laid out on August 29 would reach deep into provincial jurisdiction over the electricity system and natural resources in order to impose regulations aimed at moving Canada to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The headline promise was a get-tough approach to the oil and gas industry, which accounted for 26% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2019. And to be clear, it is not just the carbon-intensive oil sands that are targeted, but conventional and offshore oil as well as natural gas production and processing.

The more ambitious strategy would face a backlash in provinces like New Brunswick Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta where governments have resisted federal climate policies and unsuccessfully challenged carbon pricing in the courts. 

Since 2015, the Liberals have attempted a balancing act with the oil and gas sector, which had contributed mightily to the country’s economic growth over the previous 15 years and is heavily concentrated in western provinces, where distrust of the central government and especially the Liberal Party is endemic. 

Today’s Liberal campaign talk promises a more muscular approach to the industry. It’s vague about how a future government would actually implement the platform. But it is anchored in the overarching pledge to reduce GHGs by up to 45% by 2030 and put the country on track to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

That’s in line with the Paris climate agreement’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperatures to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C. 

With the election only two weeks away, the Liberals are trailing slightly in the polls and need to generate some momentum if they are going to return to power, even with a minority government. The climate crisis remains one wedge issue on which they hope to blunt the Conservatives. 

The Conservative Party, led by Erin O’Toole, says it would roll back Canada’s GHG target to the 30% reduction originally pledged under the Paris Agreement, despite a requirement in the treaty deal for countries to adopt more ambitious targets after their initial commitment. More importantly, the Conservative plan is not in sync with the goal of limiting the increase in average global temperatures to well below 2°C. Even at that level, people in Canada and around the world can expect costly and painful disruptions, with droughts, floods and rising sea levels, as witnessed last week by the flooding that inundated U.S. cities like New York, New Orleans and Philadelphia.

For its part, the NDP has set a GHG reduction target of 50% by 2030 and proposes an even more aggressive emissions reduction plan than the Liberals’, one that would also face challenges from provinces. 

Trudeau’s climate platform says GHGs from the oil and gas sector must stop growing this year, and have a clear path to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. To meet that goal, the industry would face a series of five-year targets, though it’s not clear who would set them or whether they would have the force of regulations.

The Liberal government passed legislation this spring to enforce its net-zero goal and set up a “net-zero advisory committee” that will recommend how to get there, including how much each sector should be expected to contribute. That recommendation would form the basis of enforceable standards, one Liberal strategist said, speaking off the record.

Provincial pushback would be expected 

The governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan have set no broad emissions targets – including for their energy industry – and have not endorsed the net-zero goal. Those governments unsuccessfully challenged the Liberals’ carbon pricing plan with the Supreme Court of Canada and would almost certainly balk at any federal regulations that forced industry to either curtail production or invest huge sums to cut emissions on existing facilities.

The Supreme Court ruling made it clear the federal government does not have carte blanche in setting climate change policy. University of Calgary law professor Martin Olszynski says Ottawa would be able to rely on criminal law of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to regulate industrial emissions. However, the federal government could open itself to a provincial challenge if it allows too much regulatory flexibility in the rules, Olszynski says.

The party’s climate platform contains other notable pledges that would raise hackles in certain provincial governments.

It vows to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 75% from 2012 levels by 2030. That goal is a significant increase from the target of 40% by 2025 that was set by Trudeau and former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012 and was largely supported by industry and provincial governments at the time.

The move would require a massive, industry-wide effort to improve detection and capture of methane, especially in the gas fields of northwestern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia, where the process of hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, results in large methane leaks.

Methane is a powerful GHG. It’s roughly 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide but also has a shorter-term impact in the atmosphere. In a dire assessment published on August 9, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the world must dramatically reduce methane pollution to slow the rate of global warming in the short term. 

The three western provinces have their own regulations aimed at achieving the 40% reduction that Ottawa set in 2012, but environmental groups argue the provincial approaches are insufficient to meet that goal, let alone achieve a 75% cut by 2030.

Brawl brewing over electricity regulations

While the oil and gas industry is the usual battleground between Liberals and provinces on climate change, Trudeau’s most recent plan sets up a potential brawl over regulation in the electricity sector. 

The Liberal platform promises to enforce a “clean electricity standard” that would result in an emissions-free power grid by 2030. Ottawa has set pollution standards for power plants in the past, but it is the provinces that regulate the electricity system. Often, the provinces actually own the generation and transmission assets that comprise the grid.

An “emissions free” grid would not only require the complete phase-out of coal-fired power by 2030 (which Canada committed to doing in 2018), but either end use of natural gas in power plants or force utilities to adopt expensive technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is technically feasible but is not currently widely in use.

That would leave several provinces, including Ontario, that are looking to use gas to replace coal in a bind. They’re planning to use natural gas to provide an uninterrupted supply of power and to back up renewable electricity generation, which can be intermittent.

The federal government already sets emissions standards for new power plants that burn gas, but its pledge to force a zero-emissions standard would likely provoke a battle with several provinces. Quebec, too, would likely join a provincial revolt – more to defend its provincial jurisdiction in the electricity sector than to protect its natural gas assets.

The Liberal commitments for reducing GHGs in the oil and gas sector and on the grid are aggressive and controversial, but they illustrate the depth of effort that the country would require to meet the more ambitious targets that line up with global climate change goals.

Absent an about-face by provincial governments, a less pugnacious approach would avoid renewed tensions in the federation but leave Canada as a laggard in the effort to avert catastrophic global warming.

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In the first week, however, the spotlight shone on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the ongoing debate about whether the government should require certain employees to be vaccinated as another wave of COVID-19 infections swells. Canada’s role in safeguarding future life on this planet has yet to be broached in a serious way. That is likely to change.

This campaign is bookended by a summer in which the climate emergency became increasingly apparent and the UN climate summit this fall – to be hosted in November by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – in which nations will be expected to make more ambitious commitments to head off global environmental disaster.

Each of the political parties has made sweeping promises for climate change action, and voters need journalists to ask probing questions about their adequacy and credibility.

Journalist Markham Hislop recently commented that the Conservative Party of Canada’s climate change policies as outlined in their platform effectively “close the gap” with the Liberals’ stance on the issue while suggesting that the New Democrats offer a slightly more ambitious plan than the one put forward by the Trudeau government.

The result, he suggested, is less opportunity for wedge politics in which the Conservatives are painted as Neanderthals, as they were under Andrew Scheer during the 2019 campaign.

There is some truth to Hislop’s contention, especially when journalists are preoccupied with other priorities that create more clearly defined wedges. Still, there are yawning differences among the parties with regard to climate ambition. There continue to be deep cleavages in terms of how they would treat the oil and gas sector, which is responsible for 25% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Liberals remain vulnerable 

In the past nine months, the Liberal government moved the yardsticks on climate ambition. They announced a tougher 2030 target and commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, passed legislation that provides some accountability on meeting GHG-reduction targets, and announced plans to raise the carbon price to $170 a tonne by 2030. They also announced more than $15 billion in spending to commercialize and adopt clean technologies that will help Canada meet its commitment and create jobs in the zero-carbon economy.

Still, the Liberals remain as vulnerable as they were in the 2019 election among voters who rank climate change high on their list of priorities and are unhappy with the Trudeau government’s ongoing support for the fossil fuel industry.

In addition to support for the Trans Mountain oil pipeline and export facilities for natural gas, the Liberal government provided some $1.9 billion in subsidies to the industry in 2020, the International Institute for Sustainable Development concluded in a report this year. Activists say that figure dramatically underestimates federal assistance by excluding things like pandemic-related wage subsidies and Bank of Canada bond purchases.

Conservative climate platform falls short 

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, meanwhile, is determined to give his party more credibility on climate change policy, but so far he has had mixed success.

His platform promises $15 billion in spending over several years to support the development and adoption of low-carbon technology. It includes a modest carbon price of $50 per tonne but would allow consumers to keep the proceeds of the levy to spend on a variety of energy-saving devices. The move may appeal to voters, but it would do little, if anything, to encourage less fuel consumption. The Liberal program provides cash payments to Canadians to ease the burden of the levy but is not tied to their actual spending.

When O’Toole released his climate plan last spring, analysts concluded it was a “serious” plan that could, if fully implemented, achieve GHG reductions that would put Canada within reach of our initial target of reducing emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. It’s a target that may have been reasonably laudable when it was initially set by former Conservative PM Stephen Harper in 2015.

However, that target is clearly insufficient to put the country on course for achieving net-zero status by 2050. The Liberals will no doubt remind climate-conscious voters that the Conservatives have not endorsed the net-zero target.

In April, the Liberal government increased its ambition to reduce emissions by between 40 and 45% by 2030 and hit that mid-century, net-zero goal. The New Democrats would set a target of 50% GHG reduction by 2030, while the Green Party of Canada says we need to go further and cut GHGs by 60% in the next decade.

O’Toole has the least ambitious targets, while at the same time, his party lacks credibility to implement the plan for a number of reasons.

Environmental economist Nic Rivers – who was quoted in the platform as lauding its seriousness – notes that many of the proposals are conditional on a number of factors, often requiring identical American action. While the platform has some serious policy proposals, it is easy to be skeptical about whether there will be seriousness in implementing them, Rivers says.

Conservatives remain deeply divided about the importance of GHG reductions. At a spring policy convention, the delegates voted down a resolution that would recognize the reality of climate change and the need for Canada to address it.

The party has oil in its DNA. Conservatives have worked hand-in-glove with the industry’s leaders in recent years to oppose Liberal climate and environmental policies, and their platform calls for continued expansion of oil and natural gas exports.

While Conservatives have endorsed technology to capture carbon emissions in industry, that approach faces serious limitations. Chief executives at Suncor Energy and Cenovus Energy say it would require $75 billion to decarbonize the oil sands, and they want the federal government to pay. It would take additional billions to capture carbon from conventional oil and natural gas production. None of this would address emissions that occur when the oil or natural gas is burned as fuel.

One telling item, as reported last week by The Narwhal’s Fatima Syed: the Conservative platform proposes to criminalize civil disobedience actions that would interfere with oil and gas projects. Conservatives – both federally and in Alberta – have waged war on environmental groups that oppose oil pipelines and liquid natural gas facilities as unsustainable fossil infrastructure. Former PM Stephen Harper and his cabinet minister Joe Oliver targeted environmental groups, including increased audits of their charitable status by Revenue Canada.

Still, the Conservatives are clearly hoping mainstream voters will see a “serious” enough plan to check the climate box as they consider their election options. Liberals, meanwhile, have upped their ambition considerably since 2019 and want to persuade Canadians that theirs is an urgent but pragmatic approach.

Avid climate voters, including young Canadians who rank it as a high priority, will have to decide whether Liberal actions are sufficient or opt for a more ambitious NDP environmental platform that would intrude heavily in areas of provincial jurisdiction. The Green Party has the most ambitious climate agenda and could attract ardent environmentally minded voters. However, internal battles derailed its campaign before the election even started.

In a tight contest, the parties’ ability to manage the climate agenda could be one key to electoral success.

The post Climate crisis remains wedge issue on campaign trail appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The plan, put forward by the Council for Clean Capitalism, calls for the federal government to invest $50 billion per year over six years in key sectors: buildings, transportation, electricity, heavy industry, and oil and gas.

It came in the waning days of a federal election campaign in which the climate crisis has been a central issue, and in which all leading parties have pledged to take action to reduce emissions, though with vast difference in terms of policy ambition.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity represents the kind of government efforts that are typically employed only in time of a major war or economic crisis, and its proponents argue that such an economy-wide intervention is precisely what is required to prepare Canada for the rapid transition to a low-carbon economy that will be essential to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Under the council’s proposal, grants would be made available to oil and gas and heavy industry companies that could guarantee that the investments would result in a 50% reduction in either greenhouse gas emissions or energy use in the targeted operations. Similarly, developers and contractors would receive grants for zero-carbon-ready buildings, whether through new construction or retrofits, while fleet operators, including transit authorities, would receive grants to cover the incremental costs of upgrading new vehicle purchases to be zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV). Funds would also be made available to cover the full cost of interprovincial high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power lines.

The council argues that the increased debt incurred by Ottawa would be offset by massive job creation and higher tax revenues that would result from the increased business activity.

All told, the investment effort would reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 139 megatonnes annually by 2025, taking Canada 70% of the way to its Paris treaty commitment, according to modelling done by Corporate Knights, an affiliate of the Council for Clean Capitalism. Under the Paris Agreement, Canada committed to reduce emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 and is now being urged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be even more ambitious.

The GHG reductions would be in addition to the impact of measures adopted by federal and provincial governments over the past four years, which Environment Canada has projected would leave Canada some 78 megatonnes above its target of 513 megatonnes in 2030.

“The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity demonstrates that transitioning to a low-carbon economy is less about ‘shutting down’ than it is about retooling, diversifying and growing,” said council coordinator Toby Heaps, who is also the publisher of Corporate Knights magazine. He added that the investment benefits are especially significant in the oil sector, “which offers the biggest carbon savings bang for buck, and where production costs per barrel will be critical to remaining competitive.” The plan estimates that an investment of $21 billion over six years would reduce GHGs by 30 megatonnes per year by 2025, saving the sector $10 billion in energy costs over the same time frame.

The members of the Council for Clean Capitalism include Teck Resources, HP Canada, Sun Life Financial Canada, BGIS (formerly Brookfield’s real estate management arm) and BASF Canada. Corporate Knights did the economic modelling for the capital plan.

Any effort to implement such a plan would run into significant challenges. It would add $300 billion to the federal debt over six years, represent a massive government intervention in the economy, and effectively subsidize the country’s oil and gas producers despite calls from clean energy advocates to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

However, when outlining the plan for the council, Heaps said that the urgent nature of the climate crisis justifies an unprecedented response from government.

“Stimulus of this scale would be justified by the economic benefits that accrue from a once-in-a-generation energy transition and by the need to respond to the climate emergency,” he said.

The plan would add $50 billion annually to the federal deficit for six years – roughly 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and drive the federal debt-to-GDP ratio up by 10 percentage points, to 44%. The Conservative government under Stephen Harper posted a deficit of $55.6 billion in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009/10, or 3.4% of GDP, but cut the shortfall in half within two years.

“Stimulus of this scale would be justified by the economic benefits that accrue from a once-in-a-generation energy transition and by the need to respond to the climate emergency.”

A recent Scotiabank report suggested that the federal government should be prepared to inject as much as $100 billion of stimulus, or 4% of GDP, into the economy if the global economy stalls as expected.

Heaps acknowledges that it would be challenging to justify a plan that essentially pays corporate Canada to make the reductions that climate crisis advocates argue companies should be doing on their own. However, such investments would pay enormous dividends by preparing the Canadian economy for a low-carbon future, boosting economic activity and jobs, and achieving dramatic reductions in GHG emissions, he said in an interview.

Canada’s response to the looming climate emergency has been a key issue in the election campaign that resulted in a Liberal minority government.

The Conservatives have campaigned against a carbon tax and have offered only modest alternatives, including a two-year subsidy for home renovations, to reduce emissions.

The Green Party occupies the other end of the spectrum from the Conservatives, with ambitious plans for retrofitting buildings, prohibiting the sale of gasoline- or diesel-powered automobiles by 2030 and stopping approvals for new oil and gas projects and slowly decreasing existing operations.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has promised to exceed Canada’s 2030 emissions target, but the party has not laid out a clear path to do so. The Liberals point to existing commitments that include major multiyear spending for green infrastructure such as public transit while offering, for example, a new policy of home energy retrofit loans to be financed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

The New Democrats – who may hold a balance of power in a minority government after the election – and the Green Party have both campaigned on a pledge to end subsidies and tax breaks for the oil and gas sector. The plan by the Council for Clean Capitalism would, in contrast, provide the industry – and the oil sands sector in particular – with annual multibillion-dollar subsidies over the next six years.

The Council for Clean Capitalism plan would allocate $21 billion to oil and gas companies to invest in technology that reduces their emissions. Heaps said that the oil industry offers the biggest GHG reductions per dollar invested of any sector and must be part of the solution if Canada is to have a shot at meeting its 2030 emission reduction goals.

The industry, which accounted for 27% of Canada’s emissions in 2017, is already spending more than $1 billion annually on efforts that reduce GHGs. However, it is typically only pursuing operational changes that improve energy efficiency and yield attractive rates of return due to lower operating costs. Suncor Energy, for example, announced last month that it will invest $1.4 billion to replace two coke-fired boilers with natural-gas-fired co-generation units that will produce steam for its oil sands operations near Fort McMurray and provide 800 megawatts of power for the grid. The system will reduce GHGs from steam production at the site by 25% (or 2.5 megatonnes per year) while providing a “robust” rate of return to be a “significant contributor to the company’s goal of growing incremental free funds flow by $2 billion by 2023,” the company said.

Oil industry veteran Gord Lambert said there are significant opportunities to reduce emissions throughout the industry, from the extraction of bitumen to the refining of crude into petroleum products, but companies need to see reasonable payback before making the spending commitments. “Lots of ideas are available to the sector, but the [lengthy] time-to-payout is making investment difficult,” said Lambert, a Suncor retiree who now serves as CEO of Alberta’s energy regulator and as a board member at Alberta Innovates, a provincial agency that provides financial support for innovation.

The province helps finance technological innovation with revenues generated by a provincial carbon levy that was first put in place by a Conservative government and was increased by the New Democrats after they took power in 2015. However, environmental campaigners argue the federal government should not be subsidizing the oil industry, even if such spending reduces emissions per barrel. “We need to get off oil, not reduce upstream emissions per barrel,” Greenpeace campaigner Keith Stewart said. “Public funds should be focused on a wholesale transition off fossil fuels.”

Perhaps a less politically divisive area of focus in the capital plan is its call for investment in energy efficiency and electrification in the buildings and transport sectors, which together account for over a third of the country’s emissions.

Each of the national parties has some form of energy retrofit policy in their platform, ranging from a refundable tax credit worth up to $3,800 offered by the Conservatives to an ambitious plan to retrofit every building in the country by 2030 put forward by the Greens.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity urges Ottawa to allocate $78 billion over six years to cover the incremental costs of making new buildings zero-carbon ready and to retrofit buildings in Canada. It estimates that the industry is prepared to invest $795 billion between 2020 and 2025, and the incremental 10% provided by Ottawa to cover costs of upgrades to new buildings and retrofits would be enough to bring a quarter of all commercial and residential buildings to a zero-carbon-ready standard by the end of 2025. (Zero-carbon ready suggests a property owner can reduce a building’s energy consumption to the point that any emissions from fossil fuels are offset by onsite renewable energy.)

The investment in the building sector would provide the largest boost to economic growth, the council said. The investment program would also lower costs for building owners, whether commercial developers or homeowners, and generate tax revenues for government to help offset the spending.

The targets for building retrofits (3% of total building stock per year) are consistent with the most aggressive plans seen in Europe and in U.S. states like New York and Connecticut, said Brendan Haley, policy director for Ottawa-based advocacy group Efficiency Canada.

However, there is a stubborn resistance among builders and owners to adopt the off-the-shelf technology available to dramatically reduce energy consumption in buildings. Energy efficiency technologies can require significant upfront costs that are only recouped over time. There are also barriers such as the need for management time and attention to decide what technologies to embrace, the reluctance of building operators to incorporate new systems, and the tendency of business executives to want to invest in revenue-generating assets rather than cost-saving operational changes. Those hurdles could be effectively overcome through the provision of “free money” from the federal government that would generate broad economic and environmental benefits for the country, Haley said.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity represents a radical departure for a country that has long struggled to meet its climate commitments and has battled over carbon taxes and the fate of oil pipelines. It also represents an opportunity for whatever party is in power after the Oct. 21 election to demonstrate a vision on the climate crisis that goes beyond “business as usual.”

Shawn McCarthy is an independent writer and senior counsel with Sussex Strategy Group.

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Canadians have been voting by paper ballot in federal elections since 1867. A national survey, however, found that 85% of Canadians supported the introduction of Internet voting as an additional way to cast their ballot. Through our smartphones or computers, we could vote from the convenience of our homes, workplaces, local libraries or any other public place with internet access. Embracing online voting would also make sense for governments, both fiscally and environmentally.

The financial savings alone would be impressive: a 2010 assessment showed that the usual cost of a federal election is $10 per eligible voter whereas online voting costs roughly $2 per voter. For each federal election, Elections Canada prints enough ballots for every eligible voter + 5%. That means that during this year’s election, 28.6 million ballots will be printed. If more people voted online fewer ballots would need to be printed.

Some municipalities in Canada have already added online voting to their list of voting options. In the City of Markham, online voting has been available to residents since 2003. Since being introduced, not only has voter turnout gone up 10%, but during the 2018 municipal election, 91% of all votes were cast online. For Markham, online voting has nearly eliminated the need for printed ballots.

But what’s even more valuable when it comes to creating a greener Canadian economy is online voting’s ability to reach people who may never otherwise have voted. The City of Geneva allowed citizens to vote online in 2004 during the Swiss federal election. Research done after the election revealed that a whopping 55% of Genevans who identified as “regular [voting] abstainers” actually voted online that year. In fact, Geneva’s election data showed that one in four people who voted online said that they frequently abstained from voting in the past.

E-voting could encourage the Canadian demographic that currently votes the least, the youth vote, to start casting their ballots, as they have in Geneva. In 2015, Canadians aged 18–34 had the lowest turnout in the election, just 57%. This is lower than the overall turnout of 68%, and drastically smaller than the highest turnout by age, which was 78% for people 65–74 years old.

Right now, young Canadians are leading the charge on demanding that the environment and climate change be addressed by our governments. Hundreds of thousands of youth took to the streets for last month’s Global Climate Strike in Canada. Other climate focused movements have emerged as well, such as Our Time, an environmental movement led by young people who are making a Green New Deal for Canada an election issue for 2019. A recent poll showed that 40% of those age 18–34 (the same group prone to low voter rates) believe that Canada needs to “do everything we can to fight climate change immediately, even if the economy slows as a result and jobs are lost.”

If we’re to ensure that strong climate action happens in Canada, we need to get young people to cast their ballot, and the best way to do that is by bringing the election to them by making voting digital. Though simply making online voting an option isn’t going to cut it. Just this year, the Northwest Territories used online voting for their territorial election but people aged 35+ cast 60% of the online ballots. We’d need to increase online marketing that encourages young people to vote, and expect that it may take a few election cycles for online voting to reach its full potential.

The threat of cyber security attacks would also need to be addressed. In Switzerland, the only western democracy to use online voting federally, the government sends voters a series of codes and security keys through the mail which allows one to vote online, and keeps user names and addresses anonymous. Markham uses a three-step system: residents get a voter card in the mail, they register and create a personal passcode online, and then receive a PIN number in the mail that lets them vote.

Although it has not yet been piloted, blockchain technologies, such as those that power Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, are also being considered as a way to increase security in online voting.

Despite these challenges, online voting could be a fairly straightforward way to make our elections greener overall. And it has the potential to get more young people casting ballots to ensure that climate conscious candidates are elected to Parliament.

Nahum Mann is a political organizer and former candidate for Toronto City Council in his home riding of Davenport. He is currently working on a new platform, Everysay, that lets Torontonians vote on local policy issues.

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