 Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Dave Wright and I'm with the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development in the Office of the Auditor General here in Ottawa. It's a pleasure to be with you and I really appreciate you joining me for this presentation. The title is Canadian Climate Change Mitigation Commitments, The Federal Context and the Role of the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. At the outset I'd like to start with a congratulations and thank you to the Marine Environmental Law Program. 40 years is an impressive feat, no question. Unfortunately I know because I'm getting close to that mark myself. But really my sincere congratulations to the incredibly talented and impressive folks at the Institute today and years past. My understanding has always been that MELP was founded due to the great foresight of several key faculty members in the 1970s. And what I find most impressive is that this foresight and progressiveness in advancing environmental law and policy is alive and well today and probably was stronger than ever. I can say without hesitation that my involvement with MELP during my time at Dalhousie Law School in 2003 and 2007 was the highlight of my time in the law school. I had the great pleasure of studying under Professors Dewelle, Wenderswagon Kindred and interacting with almost all faculty members in the Institute. And the work was incredibly interesting and the faculty was always inspiring, open and impressive. For this I'm extremely grateful and I know I'm not alone. I'm sure lots of people would agree. Alumni from the program would agree that it set them up for a lifelong career of fulfillment. I'd also like to extend my thanks to Laura McDougal who I know has been instrumental in pulling together this virtual conference. It's a great idea and Laura I know how hard you work and I know that you touch virtually everything that comes through the Institute's door and that you make sure it all turns to gold. So thanks very much. Turning now to the presentation and before I begin I should say that I've committed to our IT folks here at the OAG that I'll do this in one take. So please bear with me. There may be a few blunders here and there but we're going to just truck along. So the title is Canadian Climate Change Mitigation Commitments that are federal context in the role of Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. And a brief outline is we're going to look at the CESD mandate to refer to the Commissioner as the CESD. International commitments made by Canada in the climate change realm, Canadian law and policy in this realm. And then we'll look at some highlights and little lights from Commissioner reports over the years and close with some commentary and conclusions. And I should also say that the slides are as much or more for me than for you. I know that this isn't a perfect size or viewing situation but hopefully you can see well enough and I should be able to cover everything through words. Moving right along, on the mandate of the CESD we are an independent office reporting to Parliament. Commissioner's role was established in 1995 largely in post-RIO fervor when the Auditor General Act was opened up and amended to include a requirement to appoint a Commissioner. The Commissioner conducts audits of federal programs related mostly to environment, conservation and sustainability. But we also conduct studies and table reports on federal sustainable development strategies. The Commissioner also manages the federal environmental petitions process which is the closest we have to front lines contact with members of the Canadian public. And for students viewing who may be involved with environmental law student societies it's a great opportunity to get some high quality information and understand the process. It's easily accessible on the CESD website which is part of the Auditor General's website generally. This schematic depiction captures our situation in a nutshell. Essentially our job is to hold the government of the day to account by providing information to Parliament based on principles of accountability, good governance and also environmental sustainable development. Our legislative authority like I said from the Auditor General Act which was amended in 1995. Section 16 requires the Auditor General to appoint a Commissioner. And section 21.1 outlines the purpose of the Commissioner but also interestingly includes a very long and relatively progressive definition of sustainable development. One of the most interesting ones in all of Canadian legislation in my opinion. I encourage you to check it out. Section 22 sets up the petitions process and section 23 is where we get our broad powers to do what we do. And the language is extremely broad. It says that the CESD can look into and shall report to Parliament on anything that should be brought to the attention of Parliament in relation to environmental sustainable development. There's more to that provision but that really sets up a broad scope of work for us. My own perspective is that being here in the CESD office allows us to be on the front lines of implementation of Canada's environmental law and policy. We all know that there's been a lot of challenge in implementing and operationalizing sustainable development over the years. And this office has a situation where we can get deep into the information and into the challenges being experienced in implementation. At the same time as being on the front lines we also are able to get a bird's eye view of Canadian environmental law and policy. Because we can look across different pieces of legislation across different departments to see what's going on to see what's happened in the past. And also to benchmark against what other jurisdictions are doing internationally. Both at the national and sub-national and international level. So I would say that the CESD is an agent of change in Canada's environmental law landscape. But for better or worse we can't and do not comment on the merits of legislation and policy. So most of our work is confined to looking at implementation and taking the law as is and seeing how the government is doing and implementing it. Other models exist. For example New Zealand has a parliamentary commissioner of environmental sustainable development and they're able to do a little bit more prospective work. In the likeness of Ontario's commissioner of the environment who was actually modeled after New Zealand. Similarly Hungary has a human right to clean environment in their constitution and associated ombudsmen for future generation who has closer to prosecutorial powers. Although those I understand are changing because they may be too powerful. So moving on to climate change. Essentially what the CESD does is it looks at what government said it would do and examines whether it was achieved. Obviously this is a good fit for climate change. In the climate change field the world over has been experiencing a fairly significant implementation gap. That is a gap between what's committed to and what's actually done. So just quickly summarizing federal and international commitments. The story goes back further than what I have here. For example Brian Mulroney stated some quantified emission reduction targets in the late 80s. But we're going to pick it up using the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Forum. That convention was from 1992 and entered into force in 1994. This may be a repeat for many of you but in a nutshell it sets the basic architecture for subsequent agreements that includes principles and an overarching goal but no set targets. Notably the overarching goal is that we prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. Many people will know that that led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which entered into force in 2005. Canada was a priority and the commitment we made under that was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% below 1990 levels within the 2008-2012 timeframe. Canada of course officially withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 before the end of that first commitment period. We move then to the Copenhagen Accord which is an interesting beast because it wasn't created under the formal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was more of a political agreement that was noted by the Framework Convention and all the parties there but it didn't observe the consensus based requirement of the Framework Convention. Canada's goal under that was 17% below 2005 levels by 2012 and it was supported by some of the Framework Convention machinery if you will during the Cancun agreements. So as many would know as well we're now on the path to a new agreement looking at the post-2020 regime to be agreed upon hopefully in Paris next year. And things just wrapped up in Lima a couple weeks ago. Sorry I'm filming on December 18th here in Ottawa so just a little over a week ago the latest conference of the parties wrapped up in Lima and they've set out the Lima Call for Climate Action which essentially sets out the issues to be agreed upon between now and Paris. And the critics are noting that there is a very long way to go and that momentum is towards a bottom up approach without a centralized target setting system which is a different take. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. Moving right along, Canadian Climate Change Law and Policy. Quick summary, I mean essentially following Kyoto governments put in a series of different plans in place with limited implementation success. The Government of Canada Action Plan 2000, Climate Change Plan for Canada 2002, Project Green moving forward on Climate Change a plan for honoring our Kyoto commitment that was from 2005. After the 2006 election the next government came in and put in place turning the corner many will remember that as well. It was a fairly comprehensive action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. And that included a target of reducing emissions by 20% below 2006 by 2020. We'll talk about our work on that later and then around the same time was the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act which was put in place through opposition priority collaboration to hold the minority government to account to implement Kyoto. That led to a series of federal climate change plans to fulfill the requirements of KAPIA, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act from 2007 to 2011. There are six plans in total actually. But in 2009 when the Copenhagen Accord came along the government shifted its approach and declared formally that it was going to take a sector by sector regulatory approach. Under the commitment of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. And part of that was so that sector by sector regulatory approach reiterated the Copenhagen target and also indicated alignment with the United States. So under that regulations are now in place. Some regulations are in place. For example, renewable fuels regulation, transportation, both passenger heavy duty and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from coal fire electricity generation regulations are in place too. Very notably two sectors that have not been regulated and have been in the news. One in particular are the oil and gas regulations and also emissions intensive trade exposed industries are not regulated. There was some headlines made by the prime minister on that just a couple weeks ago. I think it was December 8th. So just going to quickly show you a few handy graphics. This is a blatant plug of our report, but a few handy graphics from our report. This just sets out relative size of emissions by sector. You can see the transportation is the largest oil and gas is the second largest and electricity is the third largest. So the second largest sector is not yet regulated. And many people point out that that is the fastest growing emissions sector in Canada. I also encourage you to draw on the next two. So both of our reports on the 2020 targets include what I think are pretty handy. And one of the one of the handiest summaries I've seen of federal government greenhouse gas regulatory activity. So these are basically an annotated chronology of federal government regulatory activity on greenhouse gas emissions. So if you're looking for a tidy reliable citation or if you just want to know a little bit more, I encourage you to check these out. Exhibit 1.3 in our fall 2014 report is your best source for that. So moving on to CESD highlights and lowlights in terms of the findings over the year. We've audited climate change activities in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012, and 2014. It's an area of interest I suppose. And I shouldn't say of interest, it's an area of interest for parliamentarians and it's a very important matter to the Canadian public, a matter of significance, and that's why we report on it so often, along with the requirements under CAPEA. CAPEA in fact included a requirement for the commissioner to report and evaluate on the federal government climate change plans put in place under that act. Our latest report in fall 2014 just tabled in October, this past October, included an overall statement of what we've seen over the years, which is quite handy as well. And it said the federal government has not created effective government structures for managing greenhouse gas emission reduction activities. So that's sort of everything that we've observed in a nutshell. And one thing I would point out that I noticed in preparation for this presentation is that if you look at one of our key findings from 1998, it's very similar to what we found in 2014 for better or worse. In 1998 we found that poor planning and ineffective management, that there was poor planning and ineffective management, and that the federal government should take a lead in a national effort. And in 2014 we found that planning was ineffective and action was not well coordinated. So it's an unfortunate case of deja vu all over again, unfortunate because it means we're not on track to meet our targets again and we didn't meet our targets of the past. So turning to the CAPEA reports that we produced under the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, notable findings were that the plans did actually improve over the years, but none met the requirements of the Act because the measures described would not have ensured that Canada met its Kyoto target. We also found in 2009 that expected emission reductions were overstated. Also in 2009 we found that climate change plans did not disclose uncertainties about expected emission reductions. In 2011 we found that there was a 90% decrease in expected greenhouse gas emission reductions from the 2007 to 2010 plan. Because of the shift from the Kyoto Accord target to the Copenhagen Accord target. And finally we found in 2011 that not all measures achieved the expected emission reductions. So again a key implementation challenge. Moving to the 2020 reports, or what I would call the 2020 reports, twice we've reported on Canada's progress towards the 2020 target. We found in 2012 we found that the regulatory approach was not supported by an implementation plan. We found that the government did not know how much the regulatory approach would cost the Canadian economy. We also found in 2012 that there was no clear criteria for alignment with the United States. And just recently in 2014 we found that the regulations have been delayed and that good practices have not been consistently followed in development of those regulations. We found that the planning process for federal, there was no planning process for federal contribution to the 2020 target. And that was in our 2014 report. Also in the 2014 report we found that there was no plan for greater reductions beyond 2020. And that the complexity and lead time required to put measures in place make it unlikely that the target will be met. So moving on, and in the spirit of commentary and conclusions on all of this. The question is what does all this mean? One thing it means is that, or one result has been the provinces have been moving. So there's a lot of action at the sub-national level and they're moving if not leading. I've heard one commentator describe it as a climate policy lab. Essentially the provinces have a laboratory of different policy tools and approaches underway. Notable examples is the BC Carbons tax which is showing some early successes. It's been in place six years now. The Alberta is learning some lessons from the specified gas emitters regulation. And we understand, or it's been in the news, that that's under review right now and that they're planning on putting a revised policy in place soon. Which may or may not change the current carbon price of $15 a ton. We also know that Quebec's got a cap and trade system in place and that they've linked it with California. And Nova Scotia has put in place regulations for their coal-fired electricity generation. They used it in equivalency provision in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to put that in place, which is also interesting. So we don't audit the provinces obviously, but we've noted that the government lacks an approach for planning process, for reaching the target and lacks an approach for coordinating actions across provinces and territories. So what that means is that the provinces are all going in their own directions with some alignment where it makes sense. And that's about an overarching coordination approach. That's at the Canadian and sub-national level. A few thoughts on making sense of all this in the broader Canadian and international context. And that's that I'm seeing, for better or worse, parallels between the Canadian context and the recent direction at the international level. That being, the Canada's basically gone into a de facto bottom-up approach where sub-national jurisdictions are doing what they can, establishing their own targets and coordinating to the extent that makes sense. And what's just been agreed upon in Lima and what it's looking like for the Paris Agreement at the international level under the Framework Convention is also a bottom-up approach. So in this regard Canada might be a step ahead in that a top-down approach was more or less abandoned several years ago and a bottom-up approach has emerged. The key difference in this line of thinking is that the international community does have the asset, but also the liability of a centralized process and institutional coordinator. That's been the Framework Convention and its secretariat in Bonn, Germany. For Canada's part, and that centralized system has arguably held and delayed the international system back to some degree. For Canada's part, what we've found is that Canada would benefit from such coordination and planning at the federal level. And a lesson that the international community might take from Canada, and this is looking back and seeing that this bottom-up approach has been developing in Canada for a few years now anyway, the lesson that the international community might take from Canada is that the bottom-up approach can make things very complex and uncertain, which is not necessarily what we want at the international level. Putting this another way, the international community may be trading the delay of the UN consensus-based gridlock that's plagued it for now decades for an equal delay from too many moving parts and chronic uncertainty. And this could be especially problematic for carbon markets, which have suffered in recent years as well. From my own personal perspective, what's most unnerving is to look back and see that Canada's been in the game of making quantified emission reduction targets since the late 80s when Melp was, if you will, just a teenager. Right around when Melp would have got its driver's license, I suppose, hopefully a hybrid car. Anyway, Canada is now a middle-aged person, essentially, at 40, but has made minimal progress. Developing countries are really just getting into this game of making quantified emission reduction targets and committing to them, tracking them, putting measures in place. Some that it's not a homogeneous population, some are further ahead than others, especially China. But in my opinion, the human species and the ecosystems on which we depend cannot afford developing countries to take as long as Canada has taken. And what's quite alarming is that this confounds the international legal principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Even though that principle is evolving, it still remains at the core of the framework convention. And it is included in Lima, although it's got some massaged nuance text around it, but it's still there. So it's really hard to see this tension dissipating quickly. The recent agreement between the U.S. and China on climate change mitigation and greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, which is basically a new version of a relatively old theory called contract and convergence, where the developed countries contract their emissions while developed countries reach a peak and you converge in the middle at a reasonable level of atmospheric carbon pollution. So that provides some hope, the agreement between the U.S. and Canada, but it's frankly a small bit of hope and we have a long, long way to go. What I would say, what does this mean for the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development of Canada and for audit shops and commissioners in general? I would say that the bottom-up approach elevates the importance of monitoring, reporting, and verification because if everybody's doing something relatively different in their own way, at the end of the day some authoritative body needs to be able to say that these emission reductions have actually happened and that this situation is being brought under control and that these measures are or are not working. So I would say that this results in an ongoing heightened role for national and subnational audit offices and commissioners and the work of those offices could include things such as providing a systematic review of countries' progress on achieving climate goals somewhat similar to what we did in our latest report and this is as opposed to an external review although I suspect the Framework Convention Secretary will continue to play a role there as well which they do for developed countries in particular right now. And they will also, this also provides an opportunity for collaboration on a common set across these types of offices on a common set of monitoring and review criteria so that results between countries are comparable and that's key. So in other words, if activity is dispersed across different jurisdictions in different ways then to some degree it's up to institutions in those different jurisdictions to do this type of work and then bring it up to the international level and ensure that everybody's comparing apples to apples because otherwise the climate change mitigation is simply not actually happening. Beware of loopholes in other words. So for me personally and for the office I suppose this means plenty of interesting work ahead but it's not a positive sign for the planet or for future generations. Those are my remarks and I really thank you for tuning in. I don't know how many views this will have. Anything above one would be lovely but again I'd like to say happy birthday to Mel and congratulations to all the great people there and to all the great alumni and all the best in the future. The future for work in this field is unquestionably bright. The trade off for that of course is that the future for the planet and for humanity may not be quite so bright but we can continue working towards a bright future. Thanks very much.