The committee was studying Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction plan and climate competitiveness. Appearing were Normand Mousseau, Scientific Director of the Trottier Energy Institute; Caroline Brouillette, Executive Director of Climate Action Network Canada; and Simon Donner, Professor and co-chair of the Net-Zero Advisory Body.
Normand Mousseau said Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions will fall at best 14% by 2030 and 25% by 2040 from 2005 levels, far short of legal targets, because deployed measures are not transformative and provinces have taken a wait-and-see approach. He argued the industrial carbon market is not working and that Canada is losing competitiveness to China and the EU, which are rapidly electrifying and developing advanced technologies. He recommended treating climate policy as industrial and economic policy, focusing on electrification, heat pumps, carbon capture, and clean electricity expansion, and said the consumer carbon tax’s removal can be offset by other measures to lower clean technology costs.
Caroline Brouillette said competitiveness means equipping Canadian workers and industries for global markets shifting to renewable energy and electric technology, and that backtracking on climate commitments would be ill-advised. She noted that oil and gas sector emissions are rising while other sectors decline, and that Canada is on track for only a 20% to 25% reduction by 2030. She called for no backtracking on an oil and gas emissions cap, strengthening the industrial carbon pricing system, and finalizing methane regulations, and said Bill C-5’s LNG projects are not beneficial to the climate because methane is a potent gas.
Simon Donner said the 2030 emissions reduction plan was insufficient to meet the target—government modelling showed at best a 36% reduction—and that implementation has been insufficient, with key measures cancelled or at risk. He said good climate policy is good economic policy, and that clean growth investment is held back by policy uncertainty and regulatory overlap. He recommended strengthening the industrial pricing system, developing transparent implementation deals with provinces, and finalizing announced policies like methane regulations and heat pump incentives for low-income households, adding that climate policy is an investment in long-term resilience and economic strength.
During questions, Mousseau agreed that Canada has had both bad economic and bad environmental policy, and that the country is not on track to meet 2030 or 2035 targets. Brouillette said the affordability crisis intersects with climate impacts and that fossil fuel-driven inflation cost $12,000 per household from 2022 to 2024. Donner said the industrial pricing system could be the workhorse of climate policy but needs stronger performance standards, and that equivalency agreements with provinces must be more transparent. Mousseau added that the industrial carbon market has had little impact because industries pay virtually no fees. Brouillette said Quebec is not on track to meet its 2030 target, and that Canada’s 2035 nationally determined contribution is extremely weak. Donner said that while Canada has failed to meet past targets, the emissions reduction plan was the most comprehensive ever, and the issue is that enough of it has not been implemented.
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