Election results seen as a win by environment groups

OTTAWA — Two years ago, environment groups applauded the federal election results as a win after almost two in every three voters picked a party with a clear commitment to combating climate change.

Monday’s election may have returned almost the same seat counts as the last vote, but environment leaders say from where they sit there is one big distinction.

“Now 95 per cent of Canadians voted for climate action,” said Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence.

Only the People’s Party of Canada had no climate action in their plan, he said.

The Conservative climate plan in 2019 was widely panned as lacking in both detail and ambition, something Erin O’toole acknowledged was a weakness. He made a climate plan a priority after he took over the leadership in 2020, releasing a climate plan months ahead of the election that included a form of carbon pricing, reversing more than a decade of Conservative policy that carbon pricing was “a tax on everything.”

O’toole’s plan was still less ambitious than the other parties, but it was still a commitment to act, said Isabelle Turcotte, director of federal policy at the clean energy think tank Pembina Institute.

“Even if we have different benchmarks for progress in different parties and in different groups of Canadians, we do have parties across the board that have proposed stronger climate platforms than 2019,” she said. “And climate action, the path forward was not used as a wedge issue for political gain. And that is, to me, a win.”

Both Gray and Turcotte said there is now zero time to waste, no more time for legal battles over federal jurisdiction, no more time for endless consultations that ultimately drag ambition backwards.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres told The Associated Press before this week’s UN general assembly meetings in New York, that the world was “on the verge of the abyss and we cannot afford a step in the wrong direction.”

“Hmmm, sounds fairly urgent, no?” Gray said. “We don’t have any time.”

The next UN climate meeting is scheduled for early November in Scotland, and pressure is mounting for wealthy countries like Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, to amp up both domestic action and global financing to help poorer nations keep up.

Gray said Canada is now behind many of its peers on climate action. That includes the U.S., which under President Joe Biden now has higher emission reduction targets than Canada and is spending three times as much per capita on climate initiatives.