Environment Minister Peter Kent is taking credit for Canada’s latest low greenhouse gas-emission figures, despite the fact Ottawa’s policies could not have influenced them.

Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2010 increased by only 0.25 per cent over 2009, Kent announced at a Toronto-based conservation charity Wednesday afternoon.

That brings the nation’s total GHG emissions to 692 megatonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent” in 2010. Environment Canada prepared the figures as part of Canada’s National Inventory Report. Canada is required to monitor the global warming-causing gases as a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“This new information provides hard evidence of the solid steps we have taken forward,” said Kent, according to a statement posted on Environment Canada’s website.

But in 2010, Ottawa still hadn’t taken any steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions anywhere in Canada, meaning the minute growth in emissions was due to something else. One possible cause could be the after-effects of the Great Recession, which sent emissions tumbling around the world.

In Canada, national emissions in all sectors peaked in 2007 at 751 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. (The unit “megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent” is used so that the dozens of other global warming-causing gas can be grouped under one measurement.)

That figure dropped to 731 in 2008 and 690 in 2009 until ticking slightly upward in the latest figures.

The recession’s toll on the energy-intensive manufacturing economies of Ontario and Quebec has prevented GHG emissions in those provinces from reaching their pre-recession levels.

Ontario’s high point for emissions from industrial facilities was in 2007, when it produced 73.9 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That figure dropped dramatically to 49 megatonnes in 2009 and only returned to 58 megatonnes in 2010.

In Alberta, emissions from industrial facilities did drop slightly during the recession but rebounded much more quickly. Alberta produced 111 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from industrial facilities in 2007, a figure that dropped to 110.2 megatonnes in 2008 and then climbed to 122.5 megatonnes in 2010.

All of the provincial-based figures are based on emissions from industrial facilities, since the National Inventory Report does not make it possible to search for provincial GHG emissions from transportation. However, according to the report, electricity plants and manufacturing accounted for the vast bulk of greenhouse-gas reductions between 2005 and 2010.

The regional disparities could also be due to provincial policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel use, such as Ontario’s subsidies for alternative energy sources or British Columbia’s carbon tax. However the impact of these policies are much more difficult to calculate.

The first time the federal government took action to reduce GHG emissions was in October 2010. That’s when Ottawa announced new emission standards for light vehicles and trucks that aligned with newly-released standards in the U.S.

However, those standards would only apply to 2011 model vehicles that hadn’t already been made by October 2010, reducing their potential impact on the latest GHG figures to virtually nil. The standards intensify until the year 2016, then will be replaced by a set of new rules that have yet to be finalized, according to Environment Canada.

Transportation, which accounts for 12 per cent of total national GHG emissions in Canada, is the only sector that has to reduce emissions under federal rules.

Ottawa has proposed a set of regulations to lower GHG emissions for coal-fired power plant, but those rules won’t be finalized until some point in 2012 and would not come into force by 2015, says Environment Canada.

The federal government is aiming to reduce total greenhouse-gas emissions to 607 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020, which is 85 megatonnes less than the 2010 figure. Canada agreed to the 607-megatonne level at the Copenhagen Accord in December 2009. It represents a 17-per cent reduction in GHG emissions compared to 2005 levels.

It has been widely criticized by environmentalists as being too weak to reduce the severe effects of global warming.

[email protected]