The Road to Kyoto...

Is paved with good Intentions - and it runs alongside another much more travelled road.

Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez (L - Montreal's Answer to Evita) introduced a private members bill that calls on the government to honour its Kyoto commitments. It will be passed this evening with all three opposition parties supporting it. The Government will inevitably vote against it. Trust me when I say the Liberal Senate isn't going to hold it up very long.

C-288, an Act to Doom the Canadian Economy

Section 7(1) is the most troubling part. There are a lot of ways that a country could meet this requirement, but the only viable option for Canada are the clean development mechanisms found within the accord. That is code for "Pay Russia five billion a year for six years" based on 2006 carbon market prices of 15$ a tonne. Mr. Rodriguez has admitted as much at committee. A thirty billion dollar piece of legislation that has no actual environmental benefit whatsoever because the 'credits' could only be purchased as a result of a now defunct industry from the Soviet era. Glasnost, indeed.

Suffice it to say that I don't think a lot of thought went into this bill. I am sure Pablo doesn't have a problem with it, but when I have asked him very simple questions about Kyoto, I am fairly sure he has never read the Accord or has a rudimentary understanding of Canada's GHG mix. Just like most Canadians.

For the record, Ontario's manufacturing sector has already met its Kyoto targets based on the 1990 baseline. Very few people know or understand this. OPG, however, can't say the same thing. Despite economic growth, emissions in Ontario from the Manufacturing sector have gone down.

I find it very rich that the Liberals have been criticizing C-30 by noting that everything found in it could be effected under the strong regulatory authority found in CEPA, when this bill which they are now rallying around is completely unnecessary because all of the regulatory authority the government needs to enact this bill is found in, you guessed it, CEPA.

There are two separate public policy issues to consider:
1) Is it provident for legislation like this to gain Royal Assent when the Governor in Council which it binds doesn't support it; and

2) Is it provident for legislators to pass legislation that Canada can't hope to enforce through available domestic programs?

I think the answer to both questions, in our current system of government, is no.

In the case of the latter, the Government's own Directive on Regulating would preclude the regulations required under this bill from being constructed by virtue of the fact that they would fail the cost benefit anaylisis required by the program. This hasn't exactly stopped the government before, like when it declared CO2 as CEPA Toxic. You know, the stuff we exhale?

The bottom line is that this bill is a political move, and as we all know, good politics makes for bad policy. This is horrible policy because it was crafted without a plan. Luckily, like most other bills, the devil remains in the details. And those details will come out by way of Governor in Council regulations. While they are forced to enact regulations under the act, it doesn't have to be a good one, or one that accomplishes anything.

As it relates to the former, I think Mr. Rodriguez has unwittingly contributed to the discourse on something that I have believed for a long time - that the executive and the legislature can be divorced from one another, and that party control of one level of government can effectively act as a check on the other. While I don't love his method- he has proposed a bill, as a Parliamentarian, that would tie the hands of the executive, and force it to develop, implement and pay for a plan that would force Canada to meet its Kyoto targets - haphazardly random as they are. By definition, that is the constitutional separation of powers.

In so doing, he forces the government to respond to legislation- legislation which it usually has complete control over when it controls the legislature- and be administrators of a policy directive. TODAY, our political culture doesn't really allow for this and in many ways we are seing signs of resistance. That will make for a very difficult road for any future PMB process that is passed through a minority Parliament - particularly when that PMB proposes something that the government is vehemently against.

In the future, however, there may in fact be an actual discourse between the government and the legislature on bills of this type. This time around, very little constructive engagement occured as the Liberals used the Minister's appearance to speak to the merits of this bill to ask her retarded questions with political motives. They looked very clever on TV. This happens less frequently in the United States, but admittedly, it still happens. After 220 years, oversight is taken seriously.

The sham in Canada is that people believe that there is some discourse between the legislature and the executive. Bollocks. This problem is particularly pronounced under Secretary Harpov, but the PM has been too powerful for as long as I have been alive.

Round two of the discourse will be within 60 days of the Act comming into force when the Minister (whomever that may be) will announce their plan to meet the Kyoto targets. Round one had little substantive discourse at all.