Wanted: good ideas to fight climate change.

A day after Ontario’s auditor general blasted Premier Doug Ford’s plan for not being based on “sound evidence” and likely to fall well short of greenhouse gas emission targets of 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, Environment Minister Jeff Yurek said his suggestion box is open.

“My role as minister of environment, conservation and parks is to ensure that we’re listening to everyone who has an idea going forward,” Yurek told reporters Thursday after being grilled over auditor Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report in the legislature’s daily question period.

“We’re going to evolve our plan, add in new ideas and ensure we’re going to make our target by 2030,” added Yurek, who faced criticism from New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns that the Progressive Conservative plan is “hot air” and “deceitful.”

It was an abrupt change in tone for the government after Ford said Tuesday that “we have an incredible policy moving forward to meet our target, the Paris accord, of 30 per cent. We’re well on our way. We’re actually going to exceed that goal.”

Yurek said his party needs to do a better job of picking up the mantle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions amid the auditor’s warning the existing plan could fall as much as two-thirds below the target level.

“We need to be more involved and more engaged in this fight with climate change and we’re going to do that,” he pledged.

But there is a caveat: ideas must be “conservative-based,” such as working with business and industry on innovations,Yurek said.

“We’re not going to agree with everything that’s brought forward but we’re going to take the best ideas that we think will assimilate well into our plan.”

Opposition parties said the government has axed plenty of efforts that could have helped.

They include the previous Liberal government’s market-based cap-and-trade alliance with Quebec and California that brought in $1.9 billion a year to mitigate the effects of climate change, electric vehicle rebates to spur sales and the July 2018 scrapping of more than 750 renewable energy projects in a move Energy Minister Greg Rickford said would save electricity ratepayers $790 million.

While the government initially said the contracts could be torn up without financial penalties, taxpayers are now on the hook for $231 million earmarked for compensation costs this year alone.

“This government is moving backwards on fighting the climate crisis. They’re tearing down wind farms, they’re cancelling renewable energy contracts, they’re ripping out charging stations for electric vehicles,” said Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth).

“They’re making it more difficult for us to fight it.”

He also questioned Ford’s remarks from Tuesday.

“The premier was almost certainly briefed on yesterday’s report by the auditor general ahead of time. Why would he knowingly say something that was days from being completely and utterly refuted?”

Green Leader Mike Schreiner said the province should have a comprehensive plan in place by now given the urgency of recent warnings from the scientific community.

“They’ve admitted failure by saying it’s a draft plan and it’s evolving,” Schreiner said, adding the government should have kept cap-and-trade — axed in the summer of 2018 — in place until a Conservative program effort was ready to implement.

“We’ve lost a year-and-a-half.”

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Yurek’s remarks are an admission the government’s plan is a flop, said Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser.

“They’re still trying to figure out what they’re going to do.”

The government has been raked over the coals on climate change in the last two weeks after Rickford quoted from a website that doubts the scientific consensus on climate change to justify the renewable power project cancellation and the NDP raised concerns about controversial remarks from Ford’s appointee to chair the Independent Electricity System Operator, which runs the provincial power system.

Joe Oliver, a former federal finance minister, wrote in a National Post opinion piece that Canada has “enormous agricultural potential if the land warms up” and “let’s not ignore the greater personal comfort of living in a more hospitable climate.”

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