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“All those global actions would have impacts on Alberta. And taking on those policies domestically without other action would have just significantly larger impacts here.”

And yet, the policies recently announced by the NDP won’t even conform to the two-degree target.

“We just couldn’t meet that standard, because we felt it would lead to too much of this push-away,” says Leach.

“I thought we were clear that to put in those policies here, while not seeing them elsewhere, would lead to that flight of capital and employment and economic activity, as well as emissions.”

The report from Leach’s panel talks a lot about “leakage,” meaning the flight of emissions to other jurisdictions with lax rules that make them cheaper to blow into the atmosphere.

But it’s not just emissions that leak. Jobs, capital and industry would leave Alberta to emit more freely elsewhere.

“That’s precisely it,” Leach says. “That’s why we came down on this (in the report.)

“Until the rest of the world has policies that impose similar cost, you’re not actually reducing emissions to the extent you think. You’re just displacing the emissions and the economic activity to other jurisdictions.”

For Alberta, the new standard could be punitive when interprovincial horse-trading starts, after a deal is struck in Paris and McKenna comes home.

And all this makes you wonder why Shannon Phillips, Alberta’s environment minister, is playing down the news about the new Canadian standard.