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

October 21, 2008 - Third Reading

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in third reading to Bill 8, the Climate Change and Emissions Management Amendment Act, 2008. A number of my colleagues have spoken to this bill in second and in committee. Yes, I’m the designated closer here. Essentially, this was setting up a delegated authority to manage this fund. The fund itself was set up last year through a different bill. I had put on the record my concerns about delegated administrative organizations and the way the government tries to get out from answering questions and taking responsibility for it, but I think I had done that when we were in committee. It is also repealing some clauses in the existing bill which referred to establishing emission intensity targets and is now substituting the new mechanism. Oh, this government. You gotta love them.

An Hon. Member: Alberta agrees.

Ms Blakeman: Yes, but they love me, too, so there you go.

Dr. Taft: Feel the love.

Ms Blakeman: Isn’t that wonderful?

It also did allow a director to specify an emission intensity limit for the purposes of determining a specified gas emission’s intensity in a particular undertaking and a further mechanism for a director to reclassify an operation and make that reclassification undertaking subject to specific emission intensity limits.

Essentially, there were a number of issues that the Auditor General raised on climate change in his most recent report. Again, we had put a number of those concerns on the record. I, in fact, had gone through and pointed out the numbered and key numbered recommendations that the Auditor General had made. I might recommend it to people following along at home. In that October 2008 report from the Auditor General he’s got a very thorough section on this, and I encourage people to actually go and read that.

I know that we’ve got a Minister of Environment that’s very fond of saying that Alberta has a strong climate change plan, but we in the Official Opposition continue to challenge them to prove that. We don’t think that is the case, certainly not when we look at places like California or, frankly, even the federal government, which is a bit of an irony. The idea that we can’t even really measure our progress or if we’re on target until we’re well on our way to both a 2020 and a year 2050 goal: we have serious considerations about the whole climate change plan.

Essentially, what’s being suggested and covered under Bill 8: I mean, it’s a pretty narrow bill. It’s not a very big bill. It’s one of those delightful sort of two-pagers. Oh, three – I’m sorry – three pagers.

It really doesn’t do that much. It allows for a section that basically gives them authority to pay salaries and fees while they’re performing the function of the minister, that the minister can make payments out of the fund, and then repeals a clause that gets into that specified gas emissions level that I talked about earlier. We don’t think this is really taking us that much closer to a very strong climate change policy, but I think this is the best we’re going to see. It’s not as strong as we would’ve liked to see. Considering all the things the government could have done to move forward a climate change plan, did they do it in Bill 8? No. You know, what are some of the things that they could’ve done to make this a much stronger plan? A big part of that and one of the things I talk a lot about in here because the government gives me so much ammunition to talk about it is around monitoring and enforcement. That is an area where this government is consistently weak in just about every department you look at. I’m backed up on this one by the Auditor General, who points out that Alberta has no way of knowing if it can achieve even the modest targets that it has set for itself.

I have to wonder if there’s any plan for how the funds collected from a carbon tax could possibly be strategically allocated to technology which supposedly would reduce climate change. How would it even begin to measure this? It has no other standards for measurement in there. As I said earlier, we can’t even measure our success on the 2020 or even the 2050. All of that is backed up in that Auditor General report that he put out just a couple of weeks ago. The delegated authority that’s anticipated in this act is critical to that measurement process, and who gets onto those delegated authorities becomes really important.

Mr. MacDonald: Now, who do you think might get on there?

Ms Blakeman: Yeah. Who might get on there? Well, if you look at a couple of different recommendations or projects that the Auditor General has done, one of them is to say that this government has got to get away from appointing Tory friends to all of these various agencies, boards, and commissions. They have got to. There are other Albertans that are qualified to do these jobs. They have to be looking to solicit and recruit from a wider talent pool, a wider gene pool, if I may say that, and not just appoint Tory friends.

What will be the job description and the qualifications that they will be seeking when they go to recruit people to sit on this delegated authority? We need to take this seriously. That’s one of the ways I’ll be measuring the success of the government on the implementation of this particular bill. Who do they start to put on this? Is it a pretty good cross-section of people in the community that have some expertise in this, or is it once again fairly limited?

You know, the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research was a really smart idea, and here’s why: it recruited highly qualified scientists to Alberta to work on projects that were funded by the Alberta heritage trust fund for medical research. That in itself has started to generate its own cluster of economic activity because we sort of have industries that are clustering around it that feed into and actually make, build things that the scientists need to use in their work. Also, it brings in other scientists who want to work with those names that have been recruited.

Part of that, of course, and in my mind linked fairly closely to it is the Alberta Research Council. Again, there’s another body that is carrying forward some of that important work. Are we going to look at appointing members of that Research Council or people associated with that Research Council to this delegated authority? There’s an expertise background that you could be pulling from. Our universities. The University of Alberta in Edmonton, the universities of Calgary, Lethbridge, and a number of other ones around the province also are attracting people with very good minds and a lot of expertise in this area, particularly when you want to look at things around climate change and the oil and gas sector. We are the experts here. We have lots of people to pull from. Are we going to see the government go out and recruit those people to sit on this delegated authority, or are we just going to go back to the same old Tory membership list? It’s not that there aren’t nice people on the Tory membership list. I’m sure there are. There are probably some scientists there. But, please, we have to pull from a wider pool than just that list. I’m not the only person saying that. I have backup from other unimpeachable sources.

Part of the frustration here is that we haven’t developed an overall criteria for selecting projects to fulfill the 2008 survey that they actually did. If I can pull as an example the fact that the ministry hasn’t set the maximum amount that it will pay per tonne of emissions reduction. There’s a very simple but basic starting point where we don’t know how the government plans to proceed. I don’t even know if the government knows and is just not telling us or if it actually hasn’t decided that. They don’t know what effect the actions will have on the GDP or unemployment, and we’ve got no corroboration that the actual actions will help achieve that 2050 target. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this one bill, which is one tiny little step, Mr. Speaker. It’s that overall strategy that I’m finding increasingly frustrating in that it doesn’t all seem to pull together, and we can’t see the whole plan laid out in front of us. As I’ve said, a big piece of that is, you know: what are the action plans you’re going to put in place? What are the monitoring and enforcement pieces of that? Who are the people that you’re going to put into key positions? As we’ve found out in this province, that really matters. If you’ve got people with credibility, they’re going to be able to do much better in carrying forward those projects with integrity. If you have people that don’t, you’ve got a lot more problems. I’m going to leave this debate to other colleagues in the House.

I’m willing to vote in favour of this. Certainly, the direction we were given by our critic was to support this bill. It’s just frustrating that we keep getting pieces and that none of the whole picture is very clear. Thank you for the opportunity to speak in third reading to the anticipated effect of this bill. I very much appreciate it, Mr. Speaker.