Government policy decisions sometimes really miss the mark — and the point
“Keep your eye on the prize,” is an old chestnut that has been handed down from generations of parents, teachers, coaches, mentors and motivators to encourage us to not lose sight of a goal that we have before us, regardless of the “white noise” or distractions that that pull our focus away from the ultimate goal.
A challenge for many governments in regulating is that they can tend to get so caught up in a preferred “tool” or “method” to achieve a public policy goal through legislation or regulation, that they become more focused on the tool or method than on the goal.
Two such examples can be found in different aspects of environmental public policy in both Ontario and Québec.
In Quebec, the Couillard-led Liberal government along with the Parti Québécois government that preceded it, were both focused on the electrification of transportation as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as promoting economic development.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government appears to be ready to follow down the same path as the McGuinty government with respect to the introduction of a new piece of waste reduction legislation to replace the much- maligned Bill 91 — An Act to establish a new regime for the reduction, reuse and recycling of waste and to repeal the Waste Diversion Act, 2002.
With respect to the issue of transportation electrification in Québec, it is certainly understandable why the government — regardless of political stripe — is focusing on the issue of transportation electrification.
With 97 per cent of its electricity produced by hydro generation, electricity in Quebec is abundant and has no greenhouse gas emissions associated with its generation.
Quebec also has some very aggressive GHG emissions reductions targets that it is striving to achieve — aiming for a reduction of 20 per cent from 1990 GHG emission levels by 2020, which is the Kyoto Protocol commitment.
That said, in 2012 Quebec had achieved a 6.8 per cent reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 levels suggesting that more needs to be done.
Indeed many would point to the fact that transportation represents about 44 per cent of all GHG emissions in Quebec, and then make the leap to suggest that significant reductions could be achieved by electrifying transportation.
Some significant reduction in GHG emissions may well be ultimately achieved through the electrification of transportation, but that is not likely to be any time soon.
While I do not have access to the latest sales numbers, I would anticipate that perhaps 2,500 battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were sold in Quebec in 2014.
That total would represent and impressive doubling of sales of electric vehicles in Quebec over 2013 totals. However, there were approximately 420,000 new vehicles sold in Quebec in 2014 meaning that the percentage of EV sales would represent 0.6 per cent of total sales.
Altogether there have been less than 8,000 EVs sold in Quebec and around 10,000 in all of Canada (including Quebec) but when you consider that Quebec had about 4.9 million vehicles registered in 2013 that means that the EVs represent about 0.16 per cent of the vehicles on the road.
I am in no way being critical of the electric vehicle, and I fully appreciate Quebec’s desire to use its clean, abundant electricity to put more electric vehicles on the road, however even if the number of EVs on the road increased by 100 fold in Quebec (800,000) that would still only comprise 16 per cent of the vehicles on the road (for some perspective, as of September 2014 600,000 EVs have been sold in total in the entire world).
What I am suggesting is that EVs may well be a very long-term solution to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, but EVs will have no appreciable impact on the goal of assisting Quebec in meeting its GHG emissions reduction targets in the near future.
Keep your eye on the prize.
Quebec wants to significantly reduce its GHG emissions from transportation, but focusing exclusively on EVs — or even mandating the sale of EVs will not assist in this regard.
All vehicle manufacturers will be deploying a broad suite of vehicle technologies from the refinement of the internal combustion engine, to lightweight materials, to advanced power trains that will obviously include battery electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, clean diesels, and fuel cell vehicles.
This technology is being deployed — even with oil currently under $50 a barrel simply because automakers have to make these investments to meet the very aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets that will see fuel economy essentially double from 2008 levels by 2025.
They do not have a choice. Quebec and the rest of Canada will start to see significant reductions in GHG emissions from the light duty vehicle fleet.
That is the ultimate prize. So, while EVs are a tool to assist the industry (and Quebec) in securing significant GHG reductions, they are only one of the many tools in the tool chest.
Meanwhile in Ontario a concern exists that new waste reduction legislation that Environment Minister Glen Murray will eventually introduce will simply be the old Bill 91 recycled — pun intended.
There were many issues with this Bill when it was first introduced by then Environment Minister, Jim Bradley in June 2013. One of the concerns was that there seemed to be more attention and discussion about the tool to facilitate higher percentages of waste reduction than the actual goal of ensuring that less waste was entering the environment.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) and Individual responsibility (IPR) were the tools upon which Bill 91 was based. These tools suggest that the only way to reduce and eliminate waste is to make producers of products responsible for them
at the end of their useful lives.
In fairness to Ontario, EPR and IPR are not just the preferred tools for Ontario, rather the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) has pronounced that EPR and IPR should be utilized by all provinces to address waste.
While EPR and IPR are perhaps useful solutions for managing waste related to some products — beer bottles for instance, waste management is not “one size fits all.”
What works with beer bottles may not be the appropriate solution for, say, end of life vehicles, simply because the province and indeed most of Canada, has a very robust, market driven solution to end of life vehicles in the vehicle recycling community.
Keep your eye on the prize.
If there are waste and environmental concerns related to how vehicles are being currently recycled then why not deal with those issues through the existing structure for addressing end of life vehicles, as opposed to imposing an EPR/IPR tool that would not necessarily achieve any more robust waste reduction results?
It is the results towards achieving the goal that should be the preoccupation — not the tool applied to achieve the results. Keep your eye on the prize.
