Ontario gets by with a little help from new friends

When it comes to provincial climate change initiatives, Ontario has shown that it isn’t interested on going it alone. Its latest announcement, that the province will join the international Western Climate Initiative (WCI), is the second significant partnership Ontario has entered as a way of dealing with climate change. The first, a still-nascent cap-and-trade agreement with Quebec, was announced in June.

The first agreement signaled that, even without the consensus of Canada’s provincial governments, and in the face of the federal government’s own “soft target” climate change plans, the province would be committing to the kinds of emission-reducing climate change initiatives that energy-producing provinces like Alberta were decrying.

According to a Globe and Mail article on the announcement, Ontario’s inclusion in the WCI would bring the total Canadian population under the US-Canadian agreement to 70 per cent. The majority number is a significant one, given that it inevitably compounds the difficulty of any other Canadian provinces who want to opt out of the arrangement. As Flow has pointed out, in a country whose power grids are often connected, across both provincial and national borders, excluding one territory from the actions of another is almost impossible.

Ontario’s pair of partnerships isn’t the first major provincial initiative aimed at climate change. Significantly, the provincial government committed in 2004 to including five per cent ethanol in Ontario gasoline by 2007. But in the wake of increasing skepticism over biofuels and their effects on food prices), as well as the overall emissions produced during their creation, Premier Dalton McGuinty recently softened his stance on ethanol production, suggesting that the province might revise its plan to include 10 per cent ethanol in fuel by 2010.

Federally, a similar requirement is still on the books, after Bill C-33 was passed, requiring five per cent “renewable content” by 2010. But, as Ontario’s recent announcement shows, while the province may be making its climate change decisions with the help of partners, it isn’t certainly isn’t above picking sides.