Canada and the Climate Crisis

The climate in Canada appears to be changing on climate change.  A meeting (or summit) of provincial leaders made news, first for climate crisis activists staging a protest march of some 25,000 people in Quebec City, and secondly for some action--as the premiers of Quebec and Ontario provinces signed on to a cap and trade deal.   British Columbia province had earlier instituted its own carbon tax.

This means that the three most populous provinces in Canada, accounting for nearly 90% of the country's population, are instituting carbon pricing schemes.  However, several of the major fossil fuel energy producing provinces are not participating.

These provinces are joining several US states like California in taking state and regional action to price carbon. Unlike the US at the moment, the federal government of Canada is unsympathetic (it's still Bush up there.)  Nevertheless, though the Obama administration has taken meaningful actions to regulate carbon and encourage clean energy, Congress has stymied federal participation in a carbon tax or the previously Republican-proposed alternative of cap and trade.

The complexities (and perhaps futilities) of states and provinces acting without broader participation is analyzed from a business orientation here. The need for national government action was a point made by protesters, especially regarding oil pipelines in Canada.  The premiers themselves called for federal action in their final statement.

As even the business analyst admitted, something is better than nothing.  For at least one Nobel Prize winning activist however, it was the march itself that will have the most lasting consequences, as opposition grows to a pipeline in eastern Canada, within the context of growing concern over the climate crisis.