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Since coming to power in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have firmly believed that their policies on climate change and carbon taxes would make the Conservatives unelectable, as long as Canada’s official opposition party refused to present your own plan.

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For a time, they were right. After all, if you didn’t care about reducing Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions to save the planet – as the Liberals claimed every time someone criticized their policies – what kind of climate-denying dinosaur and planet destroyer were you?

But what the Liberals didn’t anticipate was that their absurd justification for their climate policies – that Canadians paying higher gas taxes and heating their homes in winter would not only prevent floods and hurricanes in Canada, but on a global scale – would eventually collapse on its own. weight.

Indeed, with 1.5% of global emissions, nothing Canada does can have a real impact on climate change.

We could reduce our emissions to zero tomorrow and it would have no effect, while countries like China and India continue to increase global emissions mainly by burning coal – the highest carbon-emitting fossil fuel – to produce electricity.

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Having the choice between having no climate policy or having one with no discernible impact on climate change, while making life more expensive for everyone and putting in doubt the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Canadians employed in Canada’s oil and gas sector, a growing number of Canadians have chosen option “a”.

While some reject the science of climate change, a much larger group simply believes that paying more taxes won’t save the planet, a view reinforced by a report released last week by the federal environment commissioner, Jerry DeMarco, who audited the Liberals’ Canadian Net. Zero Emissions Liability Act.

He concludes that the Liberal government’s lack of transparency in implementing this law makes it impossible for the average citizen to understand, let alone believe, the Trudeau government’s claim that it will reduce emissions from the Canada by 40-45% from 2005 levels by 2030, a path to net zero emissions by 2050.

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The government says the 149 measures contained in its approach to tackling climate change will achieve an emissions reduction of 36.2% compared to 2005 levels by 2030, implying that all it takes is a final effort to reach at least 40%.

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But this claim is absurd, considering DeMarco’s conclusion that reaching the minimum 40% target will require huge increases in annual emissions reductions over the next six years, which the government is far from having reached in the last nine years.

In 2022, the latest year for which government data is available, Canada’s emissions were 7.1% below 2005 levels, meaning it achieved 17.8% of its minimum target in nine years and he now has six to reach the remaining 82.8%.

DeMarco said that while reaching the 40 to 45 percent reduction goal is still achievable and should be pursued, his own findings indicate why it is virtually impossible to believe it will happen.

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For example, when DeMarco auditors examined 20 of 149 government measures aimed at reducing emissions, they found that only nine of them were on track to meet their goals, while nine others faced challenges. and two had encountered significant obstacles, such as delays in setting and meeting targets. milestone goals.

When the audit examined 32 additional reduction measures that the government said would help increase emissions reductions from 36.2% to at least 40% by 2030, it found that only seven were new, while 22 were existing measures that had already been reported. The other three concerned improvements to existing measures.

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The audit found examples in which two different government programs funded the same projects and reported the same expected emissions reductions, raising the possibility of double counting of actual reductions.

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DeMarco was also concerned about the computer modeling used to estimate emissions reductions from various government programs, noting that they had not been updated in 2023 compared to 2022 and that some of the initial calculations were too optimistic.

Furthermore, “recent decreases in emissions projected for 2030 were not due to climate actions taken by governments, but rather to revisions to the data used in modeling.”

DeMarco was also surprised by the lack of transparency and consistency across government in assessing the cost-effectiveness of spending on emissions reductions, which cost taxpayers alone more than $200 billion. federal.

On the issue of value for money, DeMarco found that Canada was the worst performing country in reducing emissions among the G7 countries to which it belongs, including the United States, which, unlike Canada, have never imposed a national carbon tax on their citizens.

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