Canada failing on CO2 cuts: audit

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OTTAWA (AFP) — The Canadian government’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and other pollution at a cost of more than two billion dollars have not produced any measurable results, a watchdog said Thursday.

“The government cannot demonstrate that the money it is spending on some important environmental programs is making a difference,” Scott Vaughan, Canada’s new environment commissioner, told a press conference.

“The government needs to know what works, what doesn’t and why. However, our audit work for this report found gaps in the information.”

And in areas where data was available, he said he found Canadians got little value for their money.

In his Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Vaughan looked at the government’s key climate change programs and found no evidence to support its CO2 emissions reductions claims.

Specifically, he pointed to a 1.5-billion-dollar (1.2-billion-US) transfer to the provinces and territories to cut 80 megatonnes of greenhouse gases by 2012 and a 635-million-dollar (296-million-US) public transit tax credit.

The report said Environment Canada used “flawed analyses and assumptions” in establishing the amounts of CO2 reductions it expected each region to achieve as a result of the trust fund.

Because the 13 provinces and territories are not required to report how the funds are used, it is “very unlikely that (Environment Canada) will be able to report real, measurable, and verifiable results,” it says.

The public transit tax credit, when it was announced in 2007, was to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 220,000 tonnes annually by encouraging bus and subway ridership.

The following year, Environment Canada lowered its estimate of expected emissions reductions to 30,000 tonnes per year.

Vaughan said in his report the public transit program would have a “negligible impact on Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Canada had agreed under the international Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 6.0 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but emissions have instead increased by more than 35 percent.

In 2007, the government outlined a new plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent, based on 2006 levels, by 2020, saying the targets agreed to by the previous administration were unattainable.