Trudeau blasts Harper on environment in Calgary, sets carbon emission framework
Posted Feb 6, 2015 4:05 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Picking Calgary to talk about the environment, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau laid out his carbon reduction plan while blasting the Harper government’s lack of action on climate change for hurting our economy.
Trudeau spoke to a few hundred people at the Calgary Petroleum Club on Friday about setting national targets for carbon emission reductions, while working with provinces on how they can meet those goals.
He acknowledged provinces like Alberta for taking a lead on emissions and said if elected prime minister in the next election, he would meet with every premier within 90 days of a United Nations climate change conference in Paris.
“What we need in this country is leadership that is cooperative, that is collaborative, that actually sits down and achieves its shared goals and that means sitting down with the provinces and discussing and negotiating ways to actually achieve that,” he said. “We have 85 per cent of Canadians now represented in provinces that have a price on carbon, the federal government can draw together that leadership and will if we actually have a federal government that believes in climate change.”
He also blasted the Harper govenrment’s environmental policies for hurting the economy and preventing projects like Keystone XL from getting approved and getting our resources to market, as well as causing distrust with the public.
“The fact that we cannot right now get the social license required for various pipelines and for projects like this is because we have a government that has given no leadership on the environmental file for eight, nine years now,” he said. “So Canadians are anxious about how we’re going to actually protect our kids and our grandkids and how we’re actually going to provide the kind of jobs when our trading partners aren’t interested in engaging with us until we step up on the environmental file.”
He also spoke specifically during his speech about one of those partners in the United States, saying trying to bully our way into getting projects like Keystone approved is the wrong approach.
He said past prime ministers like Brian Mulroney in the 80s and Paul Martin in the 90s would’ve simply called U.S. leaders to fix such a problem.
Following his speech, groups like the Pembina Institute were quick to respond.
“We support having the federal government play a role in putting a price on carbon and setting emissions reduction targets for the country,” Executive Director Ed Whittingham said in a statement. “We also embrace the idea of the federal government providing funding for provinces to do their part in meeting aggressive climate targets.”
