Alberta Premier Danielle Smith reiterated her province’s commitment to becoming a carbon-neutral economy by 2050 at a parliamentary committee on Thursday, where MPs are studying Canada’s emissions reduction plan for the end of this decade.
Her virtual appearance included testy exchanges as Bloc Quebecois MP Patrick Bonin repeatedly demanded to know whether Smith believes in climate change. She suggested that as a Quebecer, he could not grasp the substance of one of Canada’s biggest industries.
Bonin repeatedly asked the premier whether she agreed the climate is warming up, and if human activity is primarily the cause.
Smith initially dodged the questions — first by talking about forest management practices, then by diving into Alberta’s 2050 emission reduction plan. She and Bonin continually talked over each other as she repeated her points and he continually insisted she was not answering his question.
The exchange got so boisterous, Liberal chair Angelo Iacono was forced to interject to bring things back under control.
Bonin finally got an answer when he asked Smith to state “yes or no” whether she believes the climate is warming.
“Yes,” she said.
Smith then said she agreed humans are contributing to climate change but wouldn’t say it’s the main factor driving it.
“I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not a scientist. But we do know we need to get to carbon neutral by 2050 and we have a plan to do that,” Smith said.
Later, after Bonin asked Smith if Alberta knew whether its plan to double oil and gas production would affect its 2050 net-zero target, Smith questioned his knowledge of the sector.
“Well, I understand in Quebec you don’t understand the oil industry. So you don’t understand that there’s 6,000 products that come from a barrel of oil,” Smith said, listing asphalt and carbon fibre as examples before Bonin cut her off again.
Canada has committed to reducing its emissions 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 — though recent signals from Ottawa indicate the government is focusing more on the longer-term net-zero target, 25 years away.
Net-zero refers to a situation where any greenhouse gas emissions still produced are captured by technology or natural means, instead of amassing in the atmosphere where they contribute to global warming.
In a speech Wednesday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada would announce its new climate competitiveness strategy when his government tables its first budget on Nov. 4.
The strategy is expected to mark a dramatic shift in Canada’s climate policies and Carney has said he is prioritizing results over emissions targets, with an emphasis on the economy.
Smith warned Thursday’s committee hearing that Canada is seeing energy investment leave the country for the United States because of regulatory constraints.
She cited the Liberal government’s proposed emissions cap, its ban on large oil tankers off the B.C. coast and the clean electricity regulations — all policies the oil and gas sector, the federal Conservatives and Smith have called on Ottawa to repeal.
“In the last 120 days, Canadian-based companies have announced more than $20 billion in capital investment in the United States,” Smith said in her opening remarks.
Her statement was echoed at a Canada 2020 conference in Ottawa on Thursday. Trevor Ebl, the president of Canadian natural gas pipelines at TC Energy, said he’s competing with his United States and Mexico counterparts for capital investment.
“TC Energy and other publicly traded companies, we have responsibilities to their shareholders to invest for the lowest risk and highest returns,” Ebl said.
“Unfortunately, there is a gap in the returns and a gap in the regulatory certainty. Canada is falling behind on both these fronts.”
Ebl compared TC’s Coastal GasLink pipeline in B.C., completed last year, with TC’s Southeast Gateway project in Mexico, which came online in May.
“Both of these projects are natural gas pipeline major projects of similar distances. The Coastal GasLink project took about 10 years to complete, from prospecting to in-service. The Southeast Gateway expansion project did it in under three years,” Ebl said, adding the pipeline in Mexico went from submitting its permit applications to starting construction in eight months.
The Carney government has tried to address some of the regulatory concerns with the Building Canada Act, which became law in June.
The law allows the federal government, through the new Calgary-based Major Projects Office, to identify projects it deems to be in the “national interest” for faster approval processes, which could include exemptions from certain environmental laws.
The government has some guidelines for deciding which projects would qualify, though it has refused to state exactly what it means by “national interest.”
While Conservative MPs voted in favour of the bill, they say Ottawa should simply remove regulations that slow down projects.
“This is a workaround process. Instead of fixing all those fundamentals, that by its name ‘Building Canada’ admits blocks building, they’re doing this temporary workaround process,” Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs told The Canadian Press earlier this week.
“So this gives no permanent certainty for investor confidence and proponents who want to build major projects.”
While Ebl said the new legislation and the Major Projects Office it created are positive, he believes they should apply to more than just a few projects.
“We need to apply the principles of the Building Canada Act more broadly to accelerate approval and construction of new energy projects,” he said.
