The lag time in reporting GHG emissions and a lack sector-specific data are among the gaps flagged by researchers and former federal officials
Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau plants a tree with his sons Hadrien and Xavier at the Frank Conservation Area in Plainfield, Ont. on Sunday, October 6, 2019.The federal government has made climate change a priority by promising to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, put a price on pollution, plant two billion trees and help Canadians manage the risk of natural disasters such as flooding.
“Climate change is supposedly a top priority, but the latest data on national GHG emissions is for 2017,” Dr. Reid says. “How will we to hold the government accountable for the effectiveness of climate change policy … without timely data?" “We can’t say very much about which policies are driving emissions,” Mr. Sawyer says. “So it’s really hard to understand where there are opportunities to strengthen, remove or adjust policy.”
“It could be reinstated tomorrow with little effort and investment,” she says of the driving data loggers. “The gap for this data is well-recognized, and the need is so clear."The bottom line is that Canada needs better environmental data across the board, says Wayne Smith, Statscan’s former chief statistician. Instead, the country’s green data have been moving “backward rather than forward,” he argues.
The Liberals made some progress on environmental data in their previous term. New or improved numbers have become available in areas such as electric vehicles, plastic waste and GHG emissions by province.But the government is still in the dark on some of its own flagship environmental commitments. One of the government’s 19 biodiversity targets is to reduce or maintain healthy levels of pollution in Canadian waters by 2020.
Mr. Smith says that to solve this problem, Canada needs an independent body to publish regular, comprehensive statistics on the state of the country’s environment, the way Statscan publishes GDP and employment figures – a practice that “has made it impossible for governments to disguise or ignore economic conditions.”
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