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Bill 8 – Climate Change and Emissions Management Amendment Act, 2008

October 16, 2008 - Committee of the Whole

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak to Bill 8, the Climate Change and Emissions Management Amendment Act, 2008, brought forward by the Minister of Environment. If I’m correct, this bill was brought forward in the spring. My reading of this act, which, again, is not a long act, is that it’s essentially setting up or fleshing out a delegated administrative organization to manage the fund that is taking in the carbon tax that the government has established and, you know, making it possible for that fund to operate.

For instance, after it says what the fund can do, what purposes it could be used for, it’s adding in something that talks about “paying salaries, fees, expenses, liabilities” – that would be if it got sued – “or other costs [that are] incurred by a delegated authority in carrying out a duty.” That just adds on to a long list of what the fund is allowed to do now, which is, you know, things like energy conservation, energy efficiency, demonstration of technologies emphasizing reductions, demonstration and use of specified gas capture, et cetera, et cetera. It’s inserting that special section around the delegated authority.

Then the next section it’s amending just says that the Minister can “make payments out of the Fund for the purposes of the Fund,” which were just listed for you. This is adding “for the purposes of the Fund, or in accordance with the regulations,” again adding in “to a delegated authority to enable the delegated authority to make payments for the purposes of the Fund.” It’s really giving legal context to the delegated administrative authority to carry on the work. Then again, it repeals a section that’s my least favourite section in everything that the government does, which is the one where they give themselves permission to do anything they want by way of regulations behind closed doors. They’re modifying that. What a surprise. Could it be to have less behind closed doors? Well, no.

It’s repealing 60(1). It’s taking out the “governing the maximum levels of emissions of specified gases per unit of energy output,” and it’s substituting that with “governing the maximum specified gas emissions intensity” – yes, that’s a different word than it was using before – “for operations and undertakings in Alberta based on levels of emissions of specified gases per unit.” The rest is pretty much the same: “of energy input or output.” Oh, I’m sorry. Then it goes on for a whole whack of other things. Okay. Well, I’ll come back to that, then.

It’s taking out the clause which refers to establishing emission intensity targets and gives a new mechanism that allows the minister to change these limits, and, no surprise, this is the ability of the minister to change these limits out of regulation, through the Lieutenant Governor in Council, which of course is cabinet. So it comes out as an OC. It’s allowing a director to specify an emission intensity limit.

Now, our critic on this, the Member for Calgary-Mountain View, was more or less supportive…

Mr. MacDonald: More than me.

Ms Blakeman: I’m sorry? I gather that the Member for Edmonton Gold Bar has his own comments to make, but my understanding was that our critic for the Official Opposition was in favour of this, more or less. He raised some objections.

What I’m interested in is that since this bill was introduced, now we’ve had the report fromthe Auditor General on Alberta’s response to climate change. The purpose of their audit was to assess whether the government has adequate systems in place to achieve the goals that they set out and to change the goals and targets and requirements of this particular act and the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation.

This is the first of two reports. The AG didn’t have time to look at the gas emitters regulation, so they’re just responding to the act that this is amending. They looked at it over a period from January of ’01 to July of ’08, and they examined the systems that the Minister of Environment used to report on both the 2002 plan but also the 2008 plan. We’ve had two climate change plans here in Alberta; one superseded the other. They have a number of recommendations and conclusions that they reached. But they were looking to see, you know: do the necessary systems exist? Are the systems well designed? Do they operate as they should? So they had a series of criteria.

For people following along at home on the Internet in Hansard on the live audio streaming, I’m referring to the Auditor General’s report from October 2008. This particular section that I’m on right now, is page 95 and onward where they set out the criteria of what they were looking for.

I’m more interested in the recommendations. When the Auditor General does his reports, he does his recommendations in sort of a tiered level. So if you’re looking for the big stuff, what’s really important, it’s now highlighted in yellow, and it has a little key beside it to indicate that this one is really, really, really important.

What we get out of their response to climate change that’s really, really important is numbered recommendation 11 in which the Auditor General is recommending that “the Ministry of Environment improve the reliability, comparability and relevance of its public reporting on Alberta’s success and costs incurred in meeting climate change targets.” I’m just going to flow back to what’s happening here, because we’re now setting up a delegated administrative organization that is going to carry out the work of this fund. That’s what the government has done.

When I first started in ’97, that was the thing of the day. Now we disband things, but back then the government was very keen on delegated administrative organizations and was setting them up left, right, and centre.

Mr. MacDonald: They still are. They love them.

Ms Blakeman: No. They’re taking them apart.

Mr. MacDonald: No. We’ll have to talk.

Ms Blakeman: We’ll talk. Okay.

This recommendation plays right into the amending act that we have in front of us. What I’m looking to see is: are we strengthening or recognizing in this act what has been identified by the Auditor General; that is, reliability, comparability, and relevance of public reporting? This, of course, is going to impact this delegated administrative organization immensely, and it’s not in here. What we have in here is the ability for that DAO to spend money. We have the ability for it to make payments for the purposes of running the fund and then changes around allowing the cabinet to make changes around the gas emissions intensity: orders establishing those intensity limits, authorizing a director to specify all kinds of inputs and outputs, a mechanism for the director to reclassify an organization or to change the classes around, authorizing a director to issue orders requiring someone who is responsible for an operation to take measures to minimize or remedy the effects of the operation, and authorizing the management fund to be used to pay a number of expenses.

Nothing in here particularly addresses public reporting. This is what we’re now doing; we’re collecting money from people. I think it is $15 a tonne. Yes. That money per tonne of emission, I guess, will now go into this fund, and it’s supposed to be administered, but we have nothing in here that really is able to give us any kind of assurance around reliability of public reporting and the success in meeting these targets. So we’ve got all this money that goes into this fund. It’s now got permission to pay money out of the fund.

What we’re missing is: how do we know that it is actually meeting the targets that were supposed to be set? We don’t. There’s a lot of money that can go in and a lot of money that can go out, but we don’t know if it’s actually hitting the targets.

The second recommendation that was made is not highlighted, but it is a numbered recommendation, so it still carries some weight in the AG’s report. That was recommending that the Ministry of Environment improve Alberta’s response to climate change by:

• establishing overall criteria for selecting climate-change actions;
• creating and maintaining a master implementation plan for the actions [that are required] to meet the emissions-intensity target for 2020 and…for 2050;
• corroborating – through modelling or other analysis – that the actions chosen by the Ministry result in Alberta being on track for achieving [those same targets.]

Again, not much. I can’t go back to the AG with a clear heart and say that what we’re doing in this bill is going to achieve that. The problem around the delegated administrative organizations and what we’ve seen of them over time has always been about reporting. It’s been about being able to get information. It’s been about who’s appointed to their boards. Again, the AG has noticed in the past that we tend to get fine Albertans, every one of them, appointed to these DAOs but that, interestingly enough, they all have very close affiliations with the government and with the government’s political party. Very few Liberals turn up on these boards, almost no NDs turn up on these boards, never mind people from the Green Party. So it is an insider group, and that is becoming increasingly problematic as we have so many of these DAOs but also when we’re looking at things like climate change and now having that fund run by a DAO. I’ll put those concerns on the table and see if the sponsoring minister can give us some kind of a response to that because that’s always my hesitation with the DAOS.

It’ll be interesting to see if the government tries this one again. The other thing that happened when I was first elected was that every time we asked the government a question about something that was under the auspices of a DAO or about the DAO itself, we were told: “Well, we have no control over that. Go talk to the DAO.” And you’d say, “Well, but it says in the Government Organization Act that it responds to you or that you’re responsible for it in some way.” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. If you don’t like that decision, you go and talk to the DAO.”

Well, of course, the DAO wouldn’t talk to us at all. They wouldn’t give us any information; their annual report would be coming out in 18 months. It was very hard for us get any information on it, and we just had to keep coming back to the government and going: “Ultimately, you created this group. You have to be responsible for answering for it in the House.” Eventually we stayed on the government long enough and brought up enough examples of their control of it – the very fact that they establish enabling legislation is one of the keys – that the government had to start answering for the decisions that the group was making.

I’ll be very interested to see if we end up with some ducking that starts to happen around the DAO that is anticipated in this particular legislation and empowered in this legislation to take in a whole whack of money and pay out a whole whack of money. That transparency is going to be very, very important.

Those were the issues that had really come to mind for me. I haven’t had an opportunity to speak on this bill before. I’m not objecting to the bill per se. I understand that my colleague has given it a tentative nod, but I have lived through this long enough now to have serious reservations about delegated administrative organizations and serious questions about accountability, reporting, and accuracy. How can we measure as citizens how far they’re getting towards achieving those particular targets that have been set? How reliable is the information? How can we compare it with other likeminded organizations?

Thank you very much for the opportunity to put that on the record. I look forward to the responses from the minister. I note that other colleagues are eager to speak and even have amendments, I think. Thank you.