The challenge of Canadian climate and energy federalism: Explaining the collapse of the Canadian National Climate Change Process, 1998 - 2002

This is a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, on June 4, 2015.Climate change differs from all other environmental issues because at heart it has to do with the generation, transport and use of energy. Those energy issues are of central importance to a high energy-use and energy-exporting country such as Canada but today cannot be addressed independently of their climate-change implications. The issues of climate and energy are inherently connected and, for reasons set out below, in Canada can only be effectively addressed by co-ordinated federal-provincial policy action. During the period 1998 to 2002, Canadian federal and provincial governments engaged in the National Climate Change Process (NCCP), an unsuccessful attempt to develop co-ordinated national policy which through the collective, harmonized efforts of all governments would achieve one Canadian climate change policy goal. While dubbed a climate change process, inevitably issues related to energy were of central importance and help explain the failure of the NCCP. Currently, the Canadian provinces, without federal involvement, are working to develop a Canadian Energy Strategy. In a mirror image, coordination of energy policies is the goal, but climate change implications must be considered. The purpose of this paper is to explain why the NCCP failed, in order to better inform the current or any future efforts to develop national co-ordinated climate and energy policy. While the weak institutional context for Canadian intergovernmental relations is part of that explanation, the analytical focus here is upon the interests and strategies of participating governments