Last week, when asked about the commitment Canada will be making at the United Nations climate change summit in December, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “It’s unlikely our targets will be exactly the same as the United States’.” Canadians could be excused for being surprised, given the abrupt change in direction. For over six years, the government has been telling Canadian citizens that its approach on climate change is to harmonize with the United States.

The day after President Barack Obama was elected, the Canadian government announced that it wanted to work with the new administration and explore an integrated, continental approach on climate change. Within three months the two countries had created the Clean Energy Dialogue to continue the integration process.

Since then, the prime minister has repeatedly touted a harmonized, continental approach. So has every environment minister. Just last month, current Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq sent a letter to the provinces that cited the alignment of Canadian climate policies with those of the U.S. In 2010, her predecessor, Peter Kent said there was “no practical alternative” to a harmonized approach. Before him, Environment Minister John Baird justified the abandonment of his proposal for a cap-and-trade system because Canada had to match the U.S. regulatory approach. And Jim Prentice, Canada’s environment minister when Obama first came to office, actually weakened Canada’s 2020 carbon reduction target so that it would be “aligned with the final economy-wide emissions target of the United States.”

So what happened? Why has the government suddenly changed course? The reality seems to be that harmonization has just been an excuse the federal government used to justify doing nothing, and then quickly abandoned as soon as it meant doing something.

When Obama directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon pollution from heavy industry using the Clean Air Act, Canada’s environment ministers — initially Baird and then Kent — refused to adopt the same approach. The claim was that Canada would “reach the same outcome,” in other words the same target, but use a different approach. But Canada has not come close to reducing emissions on the same level.

The EPA moved forward with regulations to address the U.S.’s biggest source of pollution, coal-fired power plants. Those regulations will reduce carbon pollution by an estimated 18 per cent by 2020, compared to business-as-usual. But the Canadian government has yet to regulate Canada’s most polluting sector, the oil and gas industry. The coal plant regulations that were passed in Canada and heavily touted by the federal government will reduce carbon pollution from coal plants by an estimated 4 per cent by 2020, compared to business-as-usual.

Now we have one more example where U.S. harmonization doesn’t fit into the Canadian government’s plan to do as little as possible to reduce carbon emissions.

So what will our government propose for the U.N. climate negotiations in Paris? After the Prime Minister’s U-turn on U.S. harmonization, he said that Canada’s target will be “of similar levels of ambition to other major industrialized countries.” Apparently, the government is now looking for today’s climate laggard to harmonize with.

Top candidates for new dance partners: Japan or Australia. Neither has submitted pledges for Paris yet, but both have floated very weak 2030 targets that are roughly similar to ones the world agreed to in 1992 at the Rio summit: stabilization of carbon pollution at 1990 levels. When this global commitment was made, Wayne’s World was in the movie theatres, “My Achy Breaky Heart” was playing on the radio, and Stephen Harper was a university student. Now, more than two decades later, it may become a commitment that will take yet another decade and a half for Canada to achieve.

That would be discouraging. Instead Canadians deserve to have their government show leadership on this most important of issues.

Tim Gray is executive director of Environmental Defence.

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