By: Martin Olszynski and Sharon Mascher
PDF Version: Beyond Carbon Pricing: An Assessment of the Major Parties’ Other Environmental Policies
Matter Commented On: Secure the Future (Conservative Party of Canada); Forward, For Everyone (Liberal Party of Canada); Ready For Better (New Democratic Party); Be Daring (Green Party of Canada)
Climate change is widely recognized as the most important environmental problem facing humanity. Indeed, in its recent opinion upholding the constitutionality of the federal Liberals’ carbon pricing regime, the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged not only that climate change is real and caused by human activity, but also that “it poses a grave threat to humanity’s future” (References re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2021 SCC 11 (CanLII) at para 2). The unsurprising result is that climate change now dominates environmental law and policy discourse. Indeed, at times – such as the current election period – it feels like climate policy has displaced all other environmental policy entirely. As one manifestation of this, Canadian voters have access to several independent and expert assessments of the parties’ climate policies (see here, here, here, and here), but very little with respect to the parties’ remaining environmental commitments. This post is intended to help remedy that situation by focusing on the non-climate aspects of each of the major federal parties’ environmental policies. We do also provide some relatively minor commentary on those aspects of the parties’ climate policies that we feel haven’t been sufficiently addressed.