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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pitches Canada as a global climate leader, one that’s adopted increasingly bold climate targets and policies under his watch. But Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions tell an entirely different story.
In the seven years since Trudeau took office, emissions have plateaued while Canada’s economy has grown 8%. A cleaner electric grid coexists with even more extraction and burning of oil. But all of Canada’s peers in the Group of Seven, or G-7, have managed to achieve economic growth while simultaneously cutting emissions, and Canada’s environmental commissioner says the country is struggling to bend the emissions curve. Among the Group of 20 major economies, or G-20, Canada ranks behind only Saudi Arabia when it comes to per capita emissions, and ahead of Australia.
Trudeau sees it differently, and this week he defended his track record in an interview with Bloomberg Green in Ottawa. “We put forward not just targets but a plan to reach those targets that included, for the first time, a broad-based price on pollution,” he said. Setting up the price, which will continue to increase until 2030, was a “political challenge,” and Trudeau acknowledged “it’s taking a while” for the impact to show up on emissions.
At a conference organized by the Canadian Climate Institute and the Net-Zero Advisory Body, the prime minister cited the political challenges of implementing climate policies, the uphill battle against his predecessor’s legacy, and the inevitability of a more rapid transition spurred by
