Canada was one of the first countries to develop a national Green Plan, an exercise completed while Lucien Bouchard was Minister of the Environment. This portfolio, then considered to be one of the most prestigious in Ottawa, was held by Jean Charest at the time of the Rio Conference. Canada was proud to give its support in Rio to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which called on the industrialized countries of the North to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. In its first Red Book, the Liberal Party of Canada promised to work toward even greater reductions. Red Book 2 contains a much more circumspect discussion of the issue, and begins by acknowledging that Canada will fail to meet even the Rio target.
Many factors are responsible.
Some of these are global in scope and origin, others are peculiarly Canadian. However reluctantly, governments have eschewed or conceded their leadership role on a variety of policy fronts, and have focused instead on reducing debts, tackling deficits, down-sizing, and deregulating. It is no surprise that the business community has generally applauded these developments. For their part, the media have helped to promote an incoherent approach to reporting on the environment, in which it is either ignored completely or attention is focused on the most extreme voices and most confrontational aspects of environmental issues. The general public has not been well-served by this style of reporting, and has assumed either that environmental problems are well in hand, or that any attempt to resolve them will require extreme measures and painful choices between economic and environmental imperatives.