Canada is set to meet — and beat — its goal of reducing emissions 40 per cent from federal buildings and cars

Anita Anand says Canada will “exceed” its target to slash planet-warming pollution from tens of thousands of its own buildings and vehicles by next year.

As the president of the Treasury Board of Canada, Anand is in charge of carrying out an environmental overhaul of federal assets and operations, greening and climate-proofing its sprawling portfolio of cars, pickup trucks and property, and making government supply chains sustainable.

The overhaul is significant because the government is both the largest owner of physical assets in Canada and the country’s largest public buyer, giving it power to drive changes in the market for clean technology and services.

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Investigating problems. Exploring solutions

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According to Treasury Board figures seen by The Narwhal, Ottawa has been busy snapping up thousands of electric vehicles and hybrids, and carbon pollution from its fleet has dropped by more than a quarter compared with the 2005-06 fiscal year. (The federal government’s fiscal years run from April 1 to March 31.)

Starting in 2025, all new light-duty vehicles the government buys must be zero-emission models, “where suitable options are available.”

Officials say they are also installing heat pumps in some federal buildings and trying to buy more electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar, or install this equipment themselves on properties in regions with high-carbon grids like Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan.

The government has also sold off some of its buildings, and has plans to shrink its footprint further in the coming years.

Apart from reducing pollution, the new inventory can also shrink government spending since more efficient buildings and vehicles require less energy.

All this work has meant pollution from federal facilities and vehicles, excluding military and coast guard vehicles and aircraft, has dropped 719,000 tonnes over the 17 years measured, a reduction of 39.8 per cent. That’s the equivalent of taking 220,276 cars off the road.

That has placed Anand within striking distance of the government’s goal to cut pollution from federal operations by 40 per cent in this category by 2025.

In an Oct. 9 interview with The Narwhal, Anand, who is also transport minister, said she now expects the government will exceed that target.

“The federal government has $30 billion in annual procurements, and what we know is that with those procurements, we’ve got to continue ensuring that they are sustainable, that they’re green and that they meet the responsibility that we’re actually explicitly saying we have for addressing the climate crisis,” she said.

“That’s the distinction between us and the Opposition, which is denying climate change even exists, and in this day and age, that is irresponsible.”

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, which is the official Opposition, has criticized the government’s signature climate policy — carbon pollution pricing, which he calls a “carbon tax” — saying it “literally does nothing to change the weather or the climate.”

He has proposed instead to “fight climate change and protect our economy with technology, not taxes,” although he has not yet clarified exactly how he would address climate change mitigation in Canada.

When asked by The Narwhal to respond to Anand’s comments, the Conservatives sent a statement by Toronto-area MP and deputy leader Melissa Lantsman saying the minister was misrepresenting the party’s environmental policies.

“The Common Sense Conservative plan will replace Trudeau’s anti-resource bureaucracy with an approval process that greenlights green projects like tidal energy, carbon capture and storage, clean [liquefied natural gas] projects that Trudeau says there is no business case for, and mines to get the materials needed for electrification,” Lantsman said in the statement.

Lantsman also accused the Liberal government of making Canadians poorer through what she described as a “punishing carbon tax” and of killing a controversial tidal energy project off the coast of Nova Scotia.

“We will bring home powerful paycheques for our people instead of Trudeau’s plan of taxing Canadians to death, selling out our jobs and sending dollars into the pockets of foreign competitors and dictators,” Lantsman said.

‘We need to move past this idea that targets don’t matter’

Anand spoke with The Narwhal on the sidelines of an event hosted by Carbon Removal Canada, a non-profit pushing to expand the use of technology to clean up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As part of the event, she held a sit-down conversation with Michael Bernstein, the executive director of Clean Prosperity Foundation, the Toronto-based climate advocacy group that created Carbon Removal Canada.

During their conversation, Anand said the government’s expectation it will surpass its target proves the value of setting climate goals.

“In a world where we have climate deniers, where we have people who argue that all the government does is set targets that it can’t meet, what we are going to do is exceed that 40 per cent target,” Anand told the crowd to applause.

“We need to move past this idea that targets don’t matter, and don’t achieve anything. We need to move well past the idea that climate change doesn’t exist.”

Lantsman, the Conservative deputy leader, said the Liberal government was “desperate” to distract from a “dismal record” of missing “every one of their own emissions targets.”

Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault has agreed Canada has not met emissions reduction targets, but he says this is due to past federal governments not putting in place the necessary laws and regulations to achieve this. The Conservatives were in power prior to the current Liberal government.

Anand was at the Ottawa event to announce the government would be buying $10 million worth of services to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The “greening government” strategy ultimately aims to achieve net-zero emissions in government operations by 2050.

The emissions the government is tracking come from sources like vehicle exhaust from the federal fleet and power plants that provide government buildings with electricity. They do not include indirect sources like the emissions from commercial airlines when public servants fly for work.

The target also excludes a broad category of public safety and national security operations, which include things like military aircraft, marine vessels and land vehicles from the Department of National Defence, the RCMP and the Canadian Coast Guard.

National Defence is the government’s biggest polluter, reporting more than half a million tonnes of carbon pollution in fiscal year 2022-23, while the RCMP emitted 66,000 tonnes and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which includes the coast guard, emitted 30,000 tonnes.

The government expects public safety and national security operations to come up with individual decarbonization plans to meet the overall goal of net-zero by 2050. There are also interim goals for this group, like buying more low-carbon fuel and converting some RCMP vehicles to electric.

COVID-19 caused emissions drop, with more to come as feds sell property

A sizable chunk of the federal emissions target was met with a combination of using less fossil fuels, more biofuels and also reducing the amount of times vehicles are used, according to a Treasury Board spokesperson.

These factors have led to a 26.4 per cent drop in vehicle emissions, they said.

As of last count, the government owned 2,448 “green” vehicles, typically zero-emission models like electric vehicles or gas-electric hybrids, out of an overall fleet of 17,307 vehicles.

Myah Tomasi, a spokesperson for Anand, also said in an email that “the government will continue to procure emissions-free electricity where feasible,” as well as to improve buildings’ energy efficiency.

“Where feasible, heating and cooling will be electrified using heat pumps or on-site renewable energy to reduce the use of natural gas and other emitting fuels,” she added.

Environmental factors also contributed to the target: a warm winter in Ontario and Quebec in 2022-23 meant less of a need to heat buildings and so lower emissions compared to the previous year, Treasury Board stated in a progress report.

And the COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop in emissions in 2020-21 as public servants worked from home, requiring fewer trips in government vehicles and less air travel.

Tomasi said emissions “remain below the pre-pandemic levels of 2019-20” even as operations have returned to normal. Though not all public servants are still permitted to work from home, the federal government is one of many large institutions that has found itself with more office space than it needs post-pandemic.

As the public service undergoes a long-term hybrid work transformation, the government has a goal to cut office space in half over the next decade.

The federal government currently owns or leases 38,722 buildings and 20,004 properties. Roughly 32,000 of those buildings are domestically owned, with the rest either leased or in other countries, the Treasury Board spokesperson said.

While the government has divested “some” buildings so far, “the majority of real property downsizing will be related to future office space needs,” Tomasi said.

She added, the government is “working to ensure that fleets are right-sized, with only the vehicles necessary for delivering services to Canadians.”

Treasury Board says it added info online after criticism from auditor

In 2022, federal environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco criticized the “greening government” strategy in an audit. DeMarco said some of the information the Treasury Board’s secretariat provided about government progress on emissions was “hard to find, unclear or incomplete.”

He also said it “did not include context that would help government decision-makers, parliamentarians and Canadians understand the progress that has been made to date and the challenges that lie ahead.”

Without this information the government can’t be certain it’s achieving its goal, he said.

In June, Anand expanded the “greening government” strategy to include Crown corporations, a major missing piece of data in DeMarco’s audit. She also added new targets for the public safety and national security operations category, among other changes.

Asked what steps the government has taken to respond to the commissioner’s issues, Treasury Board said it has published more information about how it is progressing in an “implementation plan and roadmap,” as well as published information on how it tracks “greening government” costs and savings, and more information on green procurement and indirect emissions sources.