Canadian youth don't trust their government to deliver real climate action - 2019-09-27

Canadian youth don't trust their government to deliver real climate action September 27, 2019, Anjum Sultana, National Observer

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In the late 1990s, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government was an active negotiator in the first international commitment to reduce GHG emissions. Things looked promising. But by 2002, when the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in Parliament, Canada was already failing to meet its targets.

When the Conservatives came into power in 2006, they had heaped criticism on Liberal efforts to address climate change but also failed to produce credible alternatives. Stephen Harper dropped commitments to what he called the "job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto accord" and instead introduced the Clean Air Act, which targeted contaminants creating smog without actually mitigating the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

More recently, Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has made relatively bold commitments to climate action since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Liberals have promised to clean up our oceans, introduced a revenue-neutral carbon tax and committed to a ban on single-use plastics by as early as 2021. Yet according to the Pembina Institute, if Canada continues at the same rate of reduction in GHG emissions since Trudeau's election in 2013, we won't achieve the Paris Agreement target until the beginning of the 23rd century.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Anjum | last = Sultana | author2 = Ross McDonach | title = Canadian youth don't trust their government to deliver real climate action | url = https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/09/27/opinion/canadian-youth-dont-trust-their-government-deliver-real-climate-action | work = National Observer | date = September 27, 2019 | accessdate = September 27, 2019 }}