Premier Doug Ford’s plan to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions is “not based on sound evidence” and likely to fall well short of meeting the targets the government claims.

This statement doesn’t come from some diehard environmental activist or even an opposition politician. It’s from the hard-nosed, number-crunching provincial auditor general.

If Ford hoped that scrapping the independent office of the environmental commissioner would mean his appallingly inadequate climate change plan would face less scrutiny it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report included page after page of damning revelations that show Ford’s plan to fight climate change really is as terrible as critics have said it was.

On Tuesday, Ford boasted 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.”

Then, on Wednesday, the auditor’s report exposed the plan as a sham full of inadequate policies, double counting of emissions reductions and other data blunders, and assertions based on little more than wishful thinking.

Lo and behold, on Thursday, the plan that had been “incredible” and on track to beat its targets just two days prior was suddenly a work in progress that was going to “evolve ... to make our target.”

Certainly the world is constantly changing and a government often has to update its plans to take into account unexpected events or a new circumstance. But this is not an example of that.

The government knew its plan would not result in the emission reductions that Ford and his environment minister, Jeff Yurek, were publicly claiming months ago, if not even earlier than that. Lysyk’s report makes that crystal clear.

Environment ministry staff “estimated that implementing initiatives in the Plan could likely achieve only 10.9 (megatonnes) in emissions reductions,” the report states. That’s well below the target of 17.6 megatonnes.

So the Ford government already knew its “Made-in-Ontario Environment Plan” wasn’t going to come close to doing what it claimed.

According to Lysyk’s own accounting, the situation might even be worse than the ministry forecast. Her report pegs reductions at between 6.3 megatonnes and 13 megatonnes. This means Ford’s plan could achieve as little as one-third of its goal.

What is worse still is that Ontario’s targets, which it has no real plan to meet, are already substantially weaker than the targets the previous Liberal government had in place, along with a far more credible plan.

The Ford government has told a tall tale about its environment plan. It might as well have pulled numbers from a hat given how few facts back some of them up.

The government counted on an astonishing 3,000 per cent increase in electric vehicles, despite having “no policy mechanisms” to achieve that goal since it killed the buyer incentive program as well as plans to install more charging stations. Indeed, sales are going down, not up, because of the Ford government’s decisions.

The government included reductions from renewable energy projects, which no longer exist because Ford scrapped them. In fact, it has set aside $231 million in taxpayer money (with more expected to be needed) to pay compensation for all those cancellations.

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When the government didn’t like the staff analysis that a particular policy would result in “negligible” emission reductions, it got an industry source to provide a radically different and more appealing number. In other cases, “emissions reductions were double counted.”

Ontarians now know the Progressive Conservatives do not have a credible plan to fight climate change. And they also have yet more reasons to question the Ford government’s basic competence and whether what it says can be trusted.

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