WASHINGTON—Canada and the U.S. have agreed to offer customs pre-clearance at Toronto’s island airport, force the oil industry to cut methane emissions, and permit commercial activity in the Arctic only when companies meet “the highest” environmental standards.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Barack Obama made the announcements during Trudeau’s visit to the White House on Thursday, drawing praise from Porter Airlines and environmental activists and fierce criticism from the U.S. oil and gas lobby.

They also vowed to find a solution to the eternal softwood lumber dispute Obama described at a joint Rose Garden press conference as a mere “irritant.” Trudeau said it would be settled in the coming “weeks and months;” Obama half-jokingly said it would be decided “to the dissatisfaction of all parties concerned.”

Trudeau committed Canada to new federal regulations on methane, a pollutant many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a cause of climate change and an especially controversial product of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Trudeau and Obama pledged to reduce methane emissions from the oil-and-gas sector by 40 to 45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025.

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The premiers of Alberta and British Columbia had already announced similar commitments on methane, and Obama’s environmental agency had last year unveiled plans to regulate methane from new oil and gas wells. But the new agreement covers existing wells too, exciting environmentalists and angering a U.S. industry struggling with low prices.

“After many years in which Canada moved in the wrong direction on climate change, it’s especially exciting to see Prime Minister Trudeau swiftly correct course and set Canada back on track toward a clean energy future,” the Washington-based League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.

“The administration is catering to environmental extremists at the expense of American consumers,” said the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group.

The Canadian oil industry adopted a markedly calmer tone. Alex Ferguson, vice-president for policy at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the new targets are not “hugely more onerous” than the ones they were already striving toward under Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper.

“We’ve been working down this road,” he said in an interview. “There has been a lot of performance on those reductions.”

He questioned, though, why Trudeau was aligning Canadian standards with the standards created by a president who will be out of office in less than a year. Obama may well run out of time to impose the new regulations, and a Republican successor would almost certainly refuse to proceed with them.

“Alignment is good. But don’t be a slave to that alignment if it’s not going to work,” he said.

Trudeau and Obama said they will “propose new actions in 2016” to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), but they did not provide specifics. They offered more detail on the Arctic, promising to allow only the shipping, drilling and fishing that satisfies “national and global climate and environmental goals, and Indigenous rights and agreements.”

Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, the oceans advocacy group, described the pledge as “historic.”

“The two countries have committed to making decisions about industrial activities based in part on the climate change impacts. And that’s an agreement that’s the first of its kind,” LeVine said in an interview.

The leaders also vowed to go beyond their existing pledge to “protect” 10 per cent of Arctic marine areas and 17 per cent of Arctic land areas by 2020. They said they would this year set a “new, ambitious conservation goal for the Arctic based on the best available climate science and knowledge, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.”

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Trudeau said they agreed “in principle” to allow travellers to clear customs at Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport, Jean Lesage International Airport in Quebec City, and on “rail service in Montreal and Vancouver.”

The news was applauded by Porter, the dominant carrier at Billy Bishop. Chief executive Robert Deluce said pre-clearance would allow Porter to “consider” new U.S. destinations that don’t have their own customs facilities. Spokespeople for Porter and Ports Toronto said they didn’t know how soon a facility at Billy Bishop facility might open.

—with files from Vanessa Lu

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