Canada won’t rule out imposing a national carbon price on provinces or territories that refuse to establish their own, Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna said in a weekend interview.
“Every jurisdiction needs to have a price on carbon, and the premiers have all recognized that a price on carbon is part of the solution” to climate change, McKenna told CBC’s The House on Saturday.
After their meeting in Vancouver last Thursday, First Ministers agreed in principle to introduce a carbon pricing mechanism, but details will take shape over the next six months. “The fact that we’ve been talking about a price on carbon, I think, is a huge advance,” McKenna said. “But I think it’s important that we do this in a thoughtful way, you do need experts to weigh in.”
The six-month process will result in a shared federal-provincial-territorial emissions target, but McKenna put the accent on practical programming. “We need the actions first,” she told The House moderator Chris Hall. “I’ve said this and I keep on repeating it. You can put up a target, but if you don’t have actions to get there, there’s no point—and I want this to be an ambitious target.”
She repeated her previous assertions that the Harper government’s target of a 30% emissions reduction by 2030 “is a floor…not a ceiling.”
During the First Ministers’ meeting, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall put forward his province’s troubled attempt at carbon capture and storage as a carbon reduction initiative, CBC reports.
