A Greenpeace billboard; the issue for the summit, says Jim Prentice, is getting to a treaty the U.S. and China will sign
For decades, Canada has taken pride in punching above its weight on the international stage. Now it appears we’re the ones absorbing the body blows. As scientists, activists, diplomats, and political leaders gather in Copenhagen for the United Nations’ 15th convention on climate change, Dec. 7 to Dec. 18, the northern hemisphere’s “helpful fixer” is undergoing a radical—and unrelentingly negative—image makeover. Canada “is now to climate what Japan is to whaling,” George Monbiot, a columnist for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, thundered late last month, citing the Harper government’s go-slow negotiating stance as “the major” obstacle to a new global agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. “Until now I believed that the nation that has done the most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States,” wrote Monbiot, a green campaigner and bestselling author. “I was wrong. The real villain is Canada.”
And he is not alone in that opinion. At a UN climate conference in Bangkok in October, delegates from developing countries walked out of a negotiating session (en masse, say environmental groups who were at the meeting; just five or six countries, counters Michael Martin, our ambassador for climate change) to protest Canada’s suggestion that the Kyoto Protocol—the basis for the Copenhagen negotiations—be replaced with an entirely new anti-warming pact. In early November, at another UN meeting in Barcelona, Canada was named “Fossil of the Week” by the 450 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in attendance for its efforts to “block or stall” climate negotiations. (“If the price for having strong, capable, tough negotiators at the table is being singled out,” Environment Minister Jim Prentice said at the time, “then so be it. Bring it on.”)
During the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago at the end of November, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon pointedly called for Canada to pick up the pace of negotiations and adopt “ambitious” greenhouse gas reduction targets. And a coalition of scientists and NGOs asked the 53-nation body to suspend Canada’s membership—a punishment that in the past has been meted out to such rogue states as Zimbabwe and apartheid-era South Africa—for “threatening the lives of millions of people in developing countries” through its inaction on climate change.
“Canada is effectively negotiating in bad faith, undermining the whole agreement,” says Saleemul Huq, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who joined in the suspension calls. “At least everyone else is trying to reach their Kyoto targets. Canada is doing absolutely nothing.”
The question is how a country that is responsible for about two per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (China and the United States are collectively responsible for around 35 per cent) has come to take such a disproportionate share of the blame. The answer is a mixture of politics, bad timing, and—if Canada’s critics are to believed—ill intentions.
When Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998, after years of international negotiations, there were significant doubts about whether the treaty would ever actually come into force. Although 187 countries are party to the deal, Kyoto only called for a few dozen developed nations to cut their emissions, and wasn’t legally binding until countries representing 55 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions as of 1990 gave it political ratification. (That occurred in December 2005 after the Russian Duma’s surprise endorsement.) Even then, Canada’s agreed target—a six per cent GHG reduction from 1990 levels by 2012—was based on another assumption: that the United States would at least try to move toward its own eight per cent reduction target, even if Congress failed to ratify the deal. But George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 election, and the issue of global warming went into a political deep-freeze in the U.S.
John Drexhage, one of Canada’s Kyoto negotiators, now director of climate change and energy for the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Ottawa, says the sensible thing for the Liberals to do at that point was return to the table and ask for a break. Instead, Chrétien pushed ahead, having Parliament ratify the treaty in December 2002, burnishing his own legacy, and leaving it to his successor, Paul Martin, to try to figure out how to live up to the commitment. “The Liberals do deserve some share of the blame,” says Drexhage. “It started with them trying to find loopholes—undermining the integrity of the treaty—rather than taking concrete action to reach our target.”
When Stephen Harper’s Conservatives took power in January 2006, they followed through on a campaign promise to flat-out reject Canada’s Kyoto obligations. Instead, the Tories have since pledged to reduce Canada’s GHG emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020 (effectively half of what we promised under Kyoto, eight years later), leaving the details in limbo until the Americans flesh out their own climate change plans. The new target falls far short of the 25-40 per cent reduction from 1990 levels that scientists say industrialized countries must achieve by 2020, if the world is to limit warming to just 2° C and avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. And many in the world community have expressed displeasure at Canada’s modest goals. But what appears to have really put noses out of joint is the aggressive role this country has continued to play in the negotiations over Kyoto’s next phase.
