Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions from exports reached a new high of over one billion tonnes in 2023, a 58% increase since 2012, newly-released data from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, obtained by Ecojustice and the Defence Canada, reveals.
Canada’s climate commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change do not require accounting for export emissions, only those from domestic industry.
To Ecojustice staff lawyer Reid Gomme, that’s a problem. “Canada’s emissions are not confined within our borders—nor are their impacts,” wrote Gomme in a release. “They come back to haunt us in the form of climate catastrophes, extreme weather events, rising costs of living, and dangerous health consequences.”
Still, Canada has no system for reporting downstream emissions—that is, those that occur after exports leave our borders.
In 2016, Ecojustice began filing petitions every year under Canada’s environmental petitions process. The responses suggest Canadian climate strategy’s failure to reckon beyond its own borders is setting back global climate efforts.
Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault’s response to the Ecojustice petitions emphasized Canada’s strategies for reducing emissions from fossil fuel production and transport, including fossil fuels for export elsewhere.
However, from 2012 to 2023, export emissions rose 58% [pdf] while domestic emissions decreased.
Newly drafted guidelines for a domestic cap-and-trade system, released Nov. 4 by the federal government, plan for further reducing domestic emissions to align with federal commitments to reach net-zero by 2050.
The draft regulations express the intent to reduce emissions while allowing increased production, specifying that the regulations “put a limit on pollution, not production” while “allowing continued production growth.” Ecojustice and Environmental Defence say that’s impossible.
According to the International Energy Agency, achieving net-zero energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 requires no new investments in new fossil fuel supply projects.
Meanwhile, there are seven liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects at various stages of development in British Columbia, four of which hold 40-year export licences from the federal government, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Another LNG-for-export project, under construction in Kitimat, British Columbia, is planned to be Canada’s first large-scale LNG export facility once it is up and running, which is projected for 2025. It is subsidized by more than $6 billion from the federal and B.C. governments, Environmental Defence outlines, including $5.35 billion from the province.
The federal government has looked into claims by industry that Canadian LNG exports can contribute to global emissions reduction by displacing coal in Asian markets, the Narwhal revealed. Yet a September academic publication by a team at Cornell University finds that the total carbon footprint of LNG, including its production and transport, is more potent than that of coal.
“The rise in exported emissions diminishes Canada’s credibility as a climate leader and ignores our responsibility to align our actions with a climate-safe future,” Gomme stated. “To be a true leader on the world stage, we must own and address our entire emissions profile—both domestic and exported.”
