Earlier this month, the federal government quietly released its annual inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with data up to 2024 now. The news was not good. Carbon pollution reduction effectively stalled in 2024 (down a measly 0.3 per cent from the previous year and down only 10 per cent from 2005).

Canada, simply put, is not on the trajectory on which we need to be. And with oil and gas production on the rise and the new LNG Canada plant firing up in 2025, there is no reason to believe we are on the cusp of turning the tide in this race to protect the people and places we love. (Thankfully, other countries are acting with considerably more gusto than we are.)

Why, then, have federal and provincial policies thus far been so manifestly unsuccessful at significantly bending the curve on our GHG emissions?

A core reason, I contend, is that if you survey our government policies to date, most of them have one thing in common — they are voluntary. Our governments’ current approach is to incentivize our way to victory. They offer rebates and tax credits. They seek to encourage and cajole businesses and households to transition off fossil fuels. It's not working. We've been at this for decades, and our emissions have barely flatlined with still more new fossil fuel projects on the horizon.

This is no way to prosecute the fight of our lives.

Instead of making climate action voluntary, a government aligned with the emergency before us would make climate action and the energy transition mandatory, with robust and enforceable regulations, and not in some distant future, but now.

Our prime minister, however, is instead doubling down on what has clearly been a failed approach. The Carney government’s new Climate Competitiveness Strategy (released as part of last fall’s federal budget) states that its approach “is based on driving investment, not on prohibitions.” If so, it’s a strategy doomed to miss the mark.

Prohibitions and mandates work. Objectively, the single most consequential climate policy in Canada over the last four decades was Ontario’s decision to prohibit coal-fired power generation; that policy alone can rightly claim credit for much of the entire country’s stabilizing of GHG emissions. Similarly, one of the most important climate policies made by the Gordon Campbell government in BC wasn’t the introduction of the carbon tax (even though that’s what got all the attention), but rather, a decision early in this century not to approve new coal-fired power plants.

The curse of climate mandates far into the future

Our past federal and provincial climate plans have included mandates. We’ve seen vehicle mandates, building mandates, sectoral GHG reduction mandates.  

Their curse, however, is that the target dates for implementation are frequently 10-plus years in the future, and well after the political term of the government setting them, making accountability for their attainment someone else’s problem.

The original plan for the oil and gas emissions cap was to start in 2030, but that is now abandoned.

Zero-carbon building mandates have been set by some provinces, but with 10–to-15-year implementation timelines.

The clean electricity mandate was originally set for 2035, but is now being pushed off to 2050.

Vehicle mandates were originally to require that all new vehicles were zero-emission by 2035, but Carney has now revised that to 90 per cent by 2040.

The record speaks for itself. While the climate emergency requires mandates, nothing about the mandates we’ve witnessed to date communicates urgency. Climate mandates set 10 years into the future are politically fanciful. And now, the federal and provincial governments are retreating from even these illusory decrees.

That’s because, in practice, these extended timelines just give industry time to regroup and re-prosecute, as we’ve now painfully experienced with respect to all the mandates noted above. CNO’s Chris Hatch recently called this the fossil fuel industry’s tactic of “predatory delay.” This crafty practice, Chris writes, “allows politicians and industry to perform an insidious double act — sidestepping outright climate denial while opposing climate action. In the hands of a shrewd practitioner, you can even push the timeline out to infinity.” Now the industry (with help from the Alberta government) is gunning for the methane mandate, among the few that has had a measurable positive impact.

Real climate action requires shifting from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures. A few years ago, I wrote a column invoking the need for climate mandates, notwithstanding people’s fatigue with COVID mandates at the time (although, notably, the public, in the main, still supports the COVID mandates taken during the pandemic). The need for strong climate mandates is no less today, even if the prime minister thinks otherwise.

Near-term mandates are what signal real emergency action.

Take, for example, Vancouver’s move to prohibit fossil fuels in new buildings. Vancouver city council passed its ground-breaking climate emergency action plan in 2020. The plan included a mandate that new buildings would not be permitted to use fossil fuels for space and water heating as of January 2022 — that’s genuine emergency action! The government of the day was prepared to be held accountable for its implementation. The gas industry has since made numerous efforts to reverse the policy, but now that it is in place, a strong constituency has successfully mobilized in its defence.

For those who argue that vehicle mandates take time for the industry to adjust, I offer this historic example: the attack on Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, marking the US entry into the Second World War. As of February 1942 – meaning a mere two months later – the last civilian automobile rolled off the assembly line in Detroit, and for the next four years, their production and sale was effectively illegal, this in the heart of global car culture. All those car manufacturing plants continued to operate at full tilt, but now kept busy producing military vehicles at the direction of government.

Today, in the face of climate breakdown, a government in genuine emergency mode would prohibit new buildings from tying into gas lines. It would immediately ban the advertising of fossil fuels, just like we did with something else that was killing us, cigarettes. Within the next few years, they'd make it illegal to sell new combustion-powered vehicles, while ensuring there were better alternatives for us all. And they would declare with clarity and pride that, effectively immediately, we can no longer approve new fossil fuel projects.

Because in an emergency, we can't hope for change. We have to make change happen.

(For those wanting to go deeper into the matter of climate mandates, check out this podcast episode in which I discuss the topic with Dr. Melissa Lem, past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, here. And explore the “6 markers of Climate Emergency Action” — of which making action mandatory is marker 3 — here and in this video here.)

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