Russia may be well on its way to ratifying the controversial Kyoto accord, but Canada appears to be stalled when it comes to taking any meaningful steps towards its eventual implementation, said a leading Canadian constitutional expert.

“For Canada, the implementation of the Kyoto accord will be immensely difficult, and that’s putting it as softly as I can,” said Peter Hogg.

“I am personally convinced that Canada will not fulfil its Kyoto obligation – and that’s the only observation you can make of the incredibly leisurely approach it has taken” towards implementation, he added.

Hogg, the former dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and currently a resident scholar at the Toronto-based Blake, Cassels & Graydon law firm, recently visited the firm’s Calgary office – Calgary is the focal point of Blake’s oil and gas practice – and also spoke to both the Canadian Bar Association and students at the U of C.

Blake, Cassels & Graydon photo
Obligation won’t be met, says Peter Hogg

Hogg is considered to be the leading constitutional law scholar in Canada, and has been cited 166 times in Supreme Court of Canada rulings.

Under Kyoto, Canada must cut its total greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels – an estimated 240 megatonnes – by 2012.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration has appeared to vacillate on the accord – officials have been recently quoted saying the pact will be costly and inefficient – Putin recently told Prime Minister Jean Chretien that he intends to ratify some time in the future.

Russia’s participation in Kyoto is critical, because to come into force, the protocol must be ratified by no fewer than 55 countries accounting for at least 55 per cent of global emissions based on 1990 output. Since the U.S. has opted out, Russia is the only remaining country whose ratification will allow the accord to reach its target.

Hogg noted that Canada signed the accord in 1997, when increasing population and industrial activity was already weighing heavily against such a reduction, but has tarried until this year in releasing its climate-change strategy.

Alberta’s oil and gas industry has resisted the plan, arguing that a more coherent, equitable policy is needed to address climate change.

The Alberta government in turn has rejected signing a greenhouse gas reduction co-operation agreement with Ottawa, and has embarked on its own strategy to improve technology to reduce “emissions intensity” (the amount of energy used to produce a barrel of oil or equivalent) by 50 per cent by 2020, which should cut 60 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Alberta also plans to tie its emissions to productivity – measured by provincial GDP growth – a critical economic linkage Hogg said has been largely ignored by the Kyoto protocol.

Canada’s draft strategy on Kyoto compliance includes spending more than $1 billion on convincing individuals and business to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, said Hogg. “To me, that looks distressingly like code for payments of large sums of money to ad agencies,” he told about 50 law and political science students at the University of Calgary.

He added since vague sectoral agreements with industry have yet to materialize, it’s looking like there’s little possibility of even stabilizing emissions, let alone bringing them down.

From a constitutional standpoint, said Hogg, power rests with the federal government through Parliament to enact the laws required to bring the accord into effect, although he noted “what is legal and what is politically feasible are entirely different things.”

So while it’s possible there could eventually be overlapping provincial and federal emissions-control standards, the courts may rule that the more stringent law will apply.

“As it is, Canadians are faced with a target that is almost certainly unattainable, one to which the provinces almost certainly feel no commitment,” observed Hogg.

It would have been far better, he added, to have brought all the provinces on board in the early months of the Kyoto accord negotiations to determine emission-reduction targets that both levels of government, as well as industry, could live with – “and then actually carry them out.”