(gentle upbeat music)
-: I'm here today with Jonathan Wilkinson
Minister of Environment and Climate Change for Canada.
We are very grateful that you are spending time with us today
,Jonathan.
-: Thank you very much.
-: Canada earned praise for promising
to legislate the 2050 deadline
for net zero carbon emissions.
What are the key policy changes
that you have been able to implement
or are planning to implement to support this pledge?
-: The first is we pledged to enhance our target for 2030,
and of course Canada has done a lot of work
over the last few years to address
some of the key sources of emissions.
But we still were in a position
where we had a gap to meet the target that we currently have.
We've said that we understand the urgency
and the need to enhance ambition
and we will be bringing forward in the very near term
an enhanced climate plan that will actually show Canadians
how we will not only meet our target but exceed it.
That obviously is important in terms of taking
a big step towards net-zero by 2050
but we also promise two additional things
with respect to 2050.
One was to stand up an expert advisory panel
on the pathways to 2050.
Of course, as you will appreciate,
it will often be different country by country
and certainly the pathways are different sector by sector.
And we promise to legislate in the same way
that the United Kingdom and New Zealand have done,
which is to put in place binding five-year targets
that allow us to have a legislated pathway to 2050.
That's, of course, important as a forcing function for us.
But it's also a forcing function for all future governments
in terms of being able to be transparent with Canadians
as to how we are going to meet the targets
that science tells us we must.
-: How challenging has it been from your perspective
to balance economic growth concerns
with decarbonization targets
when discussing topics around recovery?
Have you been able to observe any positive impact yet
from the green stimulus spending?
-: We continue to be very focused on the pandemic,
but we are in the process of developing
what I refer to as the enhanced climate plan.
And from my perspective, that is the economic plan.
It is about short-term initiatives
that will stimulate employment,
such as things like building retrofits
and infrastructure, investments,
and building out hydrogen or electric vehicle infrastructure.
All of those things create an immediate stimulus
in terms of jobs and economic opportunity.
But it's also about a longterm vision
around sectors that we need to transform.
-: We have seen in our own studies and engagements
with governments that some key areas are critical, such as
ensuring the economic recovery is green. For example,
prioritizing sustainability and stimulus and
what's sometimes called green strings.
For example, direct support for zero emissions technologies and
conditional support, for instance of the aviation industries
focusing on green job creation.
Did you find in your own experience
that these topics were central
to the green recovery discussion?
-: They've been very central for us.
And then of course, we also looked around the world
at some of the things that were being done
in other countries. Actually, some of your colleagues
at Boston Consulting Group helped us with that,
in terms of looking at some of the things
that were being considered
or implemented in other jurisdictions.
We also tried to think about
how we embed some of these climate related objectives
into the programming that we brought forward.
So for example, in some of the green strings kinds of ideas,
we brought forward a financing mechanism
for large corporations that included
climate disclosure related requirements.
We brought forward a couple of different plans
with respect to, for example, methane reductions
from the oil and gas sector, where we are regulating that
but during this period, we actually provided funding
to enable the implementation and the job creation.
-: Are you planning for specific re-skilling initiatives?
-: Yeah, it's certainly something that we are looking at
and working on.
We recognize that both in the short term and certainly in the long-term,
there are areas where we are going have to think
about re-skilling. The most obvious one is in coal.
We've made a commitment to phase out
coal fire power generation.
I think in particular, it's a little bit different
in this downturn or this pandemic
because of the fact that the people
that have been most disproportionately affected
tend to be young people and women,
and many of the jobs that are being created
are in areas like trades or in engineering
and those kinds of applications,
which traditionally have have been male dominated. So we need to be thinking about
how we actually think about skills training
and those kinds of things on a go forward basis.
More generally, I think we need to think about
re-skilling in the context of the kind of economy
we foresee developing over the next few decades
as the world moves very much towards
a much lower carbon future.
-: Based on our analysis, switching a little bit the topics
we see that 70 to 80% of the global emissions
in a two degree Celsius path
can be reduced through existing technologies. But the remaining 20 to 30% will require innovation
and technology development around carbon capture,
synthetic fuels and other clean technologies.
How do you see Canada realizing this vision
and closing the innovation gap?
-: So this is an issue that very close to my heart.
Before I decided to enter politics five years ago,
I actually was a CEO in the clean technology space
here in Canada with a number of different companies
for, gosh, I was in the sector for 20 years.
So, a lot of the technology that we need to
make the emissions progress that we must make exist today
and it is largely an issue about deployment.
Sometimes it's an issue about cost,
but it's largely an issue about deployment. And that's really positive.
It's not like we have to invent a silver bullet every day
for the next 10 years in order to actually
make the progress we need to make.
But certainly there are areas
where we must make further progress.
I think that we know where those are,
and there has been a lot of progress made.
So for example, in carbon capture and storage
there are certainly operating facilities
around the world, including here in Canada.
The biggest challenge is to develop technology
that actually can do this at a cost
that actually will make sense.
I think that there's a lot of interest in hydrogen. Right now, the issue there is
how do you actually drive costs for green hydrogen?
And are there pathways to actually extracting hydrogen
from existing fossil resources without carbon,
so blue hydrogen?
There's an enormous amount of work
that needs to get done there.
And there are a few other areas, obviously. But we in Canada have started with kind of looking at
the early stage, some of the supports
that we need to provide to the entrepreneur
that comes forward with an idea
to help to start evolving the idea
and then to building a company. We've actually done that pretty well in the past. But the piece in Canada where we have stumbled is
the commercialization of technology,
taking a company from 50 people to 500 people.
And that is an area where we spent a lot of time
thinking about how do we actually create assistance
from the government that will enable
some of the kinds of activities that we would like to see.
Obviously, the government can't do everything
but it's about trying to figure out
where those market failures are.
Here in Canada, it's often about getting the first
or the second or the third commercial deployment,
where there is still risk in the technology.
And so it's about thinking about how the government can assist with some of the risk that relates there
to help us to actually incent folks to be early adopters.
-: How can the government best support the creation
and mobilization of public-private coalitions
to act positively?
-: Obviously tax mechanisms can be a useful way
for drawing in private sector capital.
Like there's something in the United States called the Q45,
which relates to carbon capture and storage. It has actually incented a fair bit of activity
in that space. But also more broadly
tools that either enable private sector investment
or partnership with government.
So we created the Infrastructure Bank.
One of the things that the Infrastructure Bank
has announced recently that it's going to be doing
is essentially creating a financing mechanism
where commercial building owners can invest in deep retrofits, and essentially the Infrastructure Bank
will take on part of that
and the savings associated with energy reduction
and energy use reduction will actually pay back the bank.
For the early adopters of particularly larger scale implementations of technology,
the government can partner by either co-investing
or potentially being willing
to take some of the technology risk on board.
And so, we're looking at all of those things
because we recognize that the government
cannot do this alone.
It does not have the fiscal capacity
to make this transition happen on its own. We must actually have the private sector involved.
-: So thank you very much Jonathan,
it was a great opportunity speaking with you.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
-: Great, thank you very much.
(gentle upbeat music)