By Tracy Snoddon and Randall Wigle

In Canada the climate change policy environment is currently fragmented. Both the federal government and the provinces are implementing or proposing their own initiatives, often with little thought about how they will interact with those of other governments. While multiple governments operating in the same policy field is not a unique situation in Canada, in the case of climate change this approach can be costly and environmentally ineffective. At the same time, our policies are influenced by those south of the border. Just as the US abandonment of Kyoto under the Bush administration in 2001 made it difficult for Canada to adopt more stringent emissions reduction policies, recent climate initiatives supported by the Obama administration make it increasingly unlikely that Canada will be able to continue with the status quo.

The key objective of this paper is to focus attention on regional burden sharing, joint occupancy and transitional arrangements as the critical obstacles to be addressed if we are to move climate change policy forward.  If we fail to remove these obstacles, the status quo environment is likely to continue for some time.  We begin with an overview of the current policy environment, assessing developments at the federal and provincial levels as well as in the United States. 

The literature offers several valuable lessons about climate change policy. We review these, focusing on such matters as cost-effectiveness, revenue recycling, sectoral effects and issues of competitiveness. We also draw attention to important issues that have not received much attention, such as the interaction of federal and provincial policies. In the fourth section we propose an alternative climate change approach for Canada. The final section presents some concluding remarks.