Notley confident national climate plan can work for Alberta

Premier Rachel Notley says Alberta is comfortable with the national climate plan agreed to Friday, even as two western Canadian provinces remained offside and she faced criticism over the deal from her provincial political foes.

The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which includes a national price on carbon, was agreed to at a first ministers meeting by all provinces and territories save for Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

British Columbia appeared likely to be a holdout as well after raising concerns about whether provinces were being treated equitably under the plan, but Premier Christy Clark signed on shortly before the final announcement after receiving assurances those questions would be addressed by a review of carbon pricing.

In the closing news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers, Notley acknowledged that “there is still a lot of work to be done on how we measure comparability between the jurisdictions.”

But she expressed confidence that Alberta’s sweeping climate strategy, which includes an incoming broad-based carbon tax, a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands and an accelerated phase-out of coal-fired power, fits within the framework announced Friday.

“We’re confident that we can move forward, we can make progress on meeting our climate change objectives, that we can make progress on protecting the climate for future generations and that we can do that at the same time that we can grow our economy,” said Notley.

“We were pleased as a result, for instance, that we were able to move forward with approvals on two pipelines within that context.”

Alberta’s carbon tax will come into effect Jan. 1 based on the equivalent of $20 per tonne of CO2, rising to $30 in 2018.

Notley had already agreed to raise the levy to match Trudeau’s target of $50 a tonne by 2022 after the federal government gave the go-ahead to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and Enbridge’s Line 3 overhaul. Trudeau in turn said the pipelines would not have been approved without Alberta’s climate action.

The framework announced Friday is intended to help Canada meet or exceed its commitment under the Paris accord to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global climate change by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The agreement includes new building codes and a commitment to green infrastructure, including charging stations for electric vehicles. But the centrepiece — and the sticking point — is the carbon pricing plan.

Manitoba’s Brian Pallister has linked his province’s support of the climate plan with progress on the issue of federal health care transfers.

But Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall is adamantly opposed to any carbon tax, saying it would disproportionately affect his province’s carbon intensive industries, such as oil and gas, mining and agriculture.

In the closing news conference, Wall said the plan would make Canada uncompetitive on the world stage, while Trudeau affirmed that the federal carbon price will be mandated in 2018 as planned, even if provinces choose not to bring in their own mechanism.

Wildrose Leader Brian Jean said Friday that Notley should have been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Wall, who has threatened legal action to try to stop the federal plan.

Jean said both the provincial and federal carbon pricing schemes will punish energy-rich Alberta, which has already seen its economy hammered over the last two years by low oil prices.

“I do want to see people work together; I do want to see us work with our neighbours, the rest of Canada, to have things work better,” he said in an interview. “But we should have a premier that sticks up for our province,”

[email protected]