Canadians could be forgiven for being a bit confused about how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is doing on climate change these days.

Last week he approved one of the largest sources of carbon pollution in the country — the Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal in B.C.

The week before that his government announced it would stick with Harper-era emissions targets.

Now Trudeau has announced the creation of a pan-Canadian carbon-pricing framework, which means our country will have a carbon tax nation-wide for the first time ever.

So are we hurtling toward overshooting our climate targets or are we finally getting on track?

Let’s look first at the carbon price announcement.

The carbon price will begin at $10 in 2018 and will scale up $10 per year until 2022.

The announcement “sends a clear signal that we’re all in this together and that we need a federal approach to regulate carbon pollution,” said Amin Asadollahi, lead for climate change mitigation at the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

The timing seems right as well, with a new Nanos poll showing 77 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support Canada pursuing a national plan to meet international climate commitments. Additionally, 62 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support a national carbon price.

Under the new framework, provinces will have the autonomy to choose a carbon pricing mechanism that works for them, whether carbon tax or cap and trade, and all revenues generated in province will stay in province.

Having a pan-Canadian framework for pricing carbon creates incentive for businesses, Assadollahi said, and “harmonizes the approach rather than having patchwork policies across the country.”

However, critics have already come out against the price as too weak to be useful.

“I was very disappointed we were starting with $10 per tonne,” said Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party, “which is so low under British Columbia’s carbon tax of $30 per tonne. It was an obvious political calculation.”

And bringing the provinces together may be harder than Trudeau bargained for.

Already Premier Rachel Notley has announced Alberta will only support the plan in exchange for pipeline access to tidewater. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who has been a vocal opponent of carbon pricing for years, used the announcement to reiterate his position, saying the announcement wasn’t worth the carbon emissions it took to fly environment ministers to Ottawa.

May told DeSmog Canada the “recalcitrance of the provinces is very disconcerting.”

May said the environment ministers of Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, who were visiting a meeting of the ministers this morning, made a statement by walking out in response to Trudeau’s carbon price announcement.

“Ministers of provinces storming out of meetings is just childish,” May said, especially given the flexibility of the carbon price plan to suit individual provinces and territories.

Canada’s New Carbon Price: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly #carbontax #cdnpoli #climate https://t.co/g9nBo5m8d2

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 4, 2016

Matt Horne, senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute, said the Prime Minister made a smart political move in considering differences among provinces in the plan.

“The feds were wise not to be too prescriptive here,” Horne told DeSmog Canada.

“The decision they made on the flexibility of the mechanism and revenue generated is interesting,” Horne said. “You have got to achieve this level of ambition but how you do it and how you use the revenue is up to you.”

“That gives maximum space to someone like Brad Wall to make this work in Saskatchewan.”

Province by province regulations will be necessary to meaningfully reduce emissions where they start.

A recent report by Mark Jaccard, climate policy analyst and professor at Simon Fraser University, found a carbon tax of $200 per tonne would be necessary to catalyze significant climate action and a transition to renewable energy systems.

Jaccard said an overreliance on carbon pricing can mask a suite of alternative options like sector-by-sector performance standards, renewable portfolio standards, mandatory market shares and zero-emission vehicles.

“Ninety per cent of the reductions in the last eight or nine years…in California are occurring because of the flexible regs, not because of that very low floor price in their cap-and-trade,” Jaccard told DeSmog Canada in a recent interview.

Whether or not this federal government will be a strong actor on climate change remains to be determined.

For Kai Nagata, communications director at the Dogwood Institute, Trudeau’s carbon price announcement should be viewed within the context of last week’s approval of the Pacific Northwest LNG export terminal.

“If you set a weak carbon pricing target, that means to hit your pollution reductions targets you have to reduce actual carbon infrastructure. Are we doing that? Not at all, in fact, quite the opposite.”

“This is the dilemma,” Nagata said, “no one believes carbon pricing alone, through whatever form, is going to reduce pollution enough to get at base pollution levels.”

“The only thing that would really take a bite out of Canada’s carbon pie is to stop adding fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Nagata added if Trudeau fails to put pressure on the energy sector to reduce emissions, that pressure will be placed on other less-polluting sectors and individual citizens.

“It’s fundamentally unfair and it will have the effect, if they continue to approve extraction and production, of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry at the expense of the ordinary citizen.”

Alex Doukas, senior campaigner at Oil Change International, also pointed to the issue of subsidies.

“Setting a strong national carbon price is potentially a very important step forward for Canadian climate action,” Doukas said. “But there’s a multi-billion-dollar elephant in the room: Canada still gives $3.3 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies each year.”

Doukas said the Trudeau government needs to complement its carbon price with an “ambitious timeline for phasing out all of its fossil fuel subsidies.”

“Otherwise, the Trudeau government’s incentives to polluters risks cancelling out the newly announced carbon price.”

So while some Canadians are celebrating the announcement of a national carbon tax as a victory, it will remain pyrrhic until Trudeau implements the types of regulation that will actually bring significant emissions reductions and starts to make the tough calls on building new fossil fuel infrastructure. Until then, we’re going to hold the applause.

Update: October 4, 2016. The provincial environment ministers walked out of a meeting of ministers in Montreal, not out of the House of Commons as was previously stated. Kai Nagata’s title has been updated from energy and democracy director to communications director. 

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By now, it’s an almost entirely predictable routine: a celebrity takes a tour of the Alberta oilsands for a day or two and quickly harnesses apocalyptic rhetoric in press conferences to detail the experience. Chagrined industry spokespeople lash out. News coverage dissipates after a few days. Rinse and repeat. Thus far, Neve Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Darren Aronofsky, Desmond Tutu and James Cameron have partaken in the ritual.

Now, at long last, we can add Bill Nye to the already stacked roster, thanks to his recent two-day stint in the area for a climate change documentary he’s working on.

“Producing all this oil that’s producing all this carbon dioxide, that’s not good from a global stand point,” the Science Guy said in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, which was tweeted by the likes of Bill McKibben and 350.org.

Nye’s statement is very true. Alberta’s oilsands represent fossil fuel development on an unprecedented and highly visible scale. Canada won’t meet its 2020 emissions reduction targets as a result of the growing sector (by that year, the oilsands are expected to churn more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually than all the passenger transport in the country).

But do celebrity visits help push the dialogue out of gridlock?

“Where they can often fail is there’s a really naive and limited zero-or-one view of fossil fuels,” says Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures research cluster. “Celebrities come up, they see the price of extraction, they see the scale, they’re horrified and they say: ‘Tomorrow, let’s stop using them.’ It’s really not a way to generate a narrative that will get us to where we might want to be.”

The West Versus the Rest

It’s a situation severely complicated by the fact Canada is a federation, not a unitary state, with resource development entirely governed by the provinces. Albertan voters are very proud of that latter fact.

Mary Janigan, author of Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, notes the prairie provinces weren’t birthed with resource control, resulting in decades of spatting due to perceived “constitutional inequality.”

Alberta finally received ownership in 1930 and fiercely resisted infringements on such rights in the years to follow (think of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed’s labelling of the 1973 oil tax as “the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation,” or the backlash to Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift proposal in 2008).

“The people of the West may not remember the history,” Janigan says. “I’m sure a lot don’t. But it’s become part, I would argue, of the identity of provincial pride. You can see people bristling when the idea of a national carbon tax is raised, because the provinces do own their resources and control them. The National Energy Program (NEP) settled that once and for all.”

It’s a backstory celebrities who visit the oilsands don’t tend to take the time to explore. As a result, statements from people like DiCaprio that “we must fight to keep this carbon in the ground” can often be met with hostile headlines like “Back off our oilsands, Leo.” Every attack seems to solidify already polarized positions.

Much-Needed Public Attention

Unfortunately, the visits are often the only way to generate noteworthy dialogue on the matter.

Mark Meister — professor and chair of the department of communication at North Dakota State University and author of “Celebrity Culture and Environment” in The Rutledge Handbook of Environment and Communication — says celebrity environmentalists can bring much-needed public attention to an issue that politicians and other prominent figures often ignore.

There are three types of celebrity environmentalists, Meister says. There’s the celebrity conservationist, like DiCaprio; the conservationist turned celebrity, like David Suzuki; and celebrity politicians like Al Gore.

Of the three, Meister says he’s partial to the conservationist-turned-celebrity type — a category which Nye falls fairly neatly into as a mechanical engineer and science educator — as they often have a stronger scientific background and therefore more legitimacy to speak on technical issues.

Still, celebrities often oversimplify complex issues. And organizations on the ground like the Pembina Institute and Petrocultures are confronted with the challenge of translating momentum generated by celebrity soundbytes into public pressure for tangible policy outcomes.

Harnessing Celebrity Momentum

Amin Asadollahi, oilsands program director at the Pembina Institute, points to many such policy ideas, including investments in renewable and clean tech sectors, diversification of the economy and incentivizing industry to reduce emissions with carbon pricing. Those alone are intricate subjects often beyond the purview of celebrities.

Szeman is concerned with an even headier set of questions, noting the reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuels (as G7 countries recently pledged to do by 2100) will necessitate a radical restructuring of how society prioritizes things like mobility, leisure and consumption.

In other words, the transition will require the exploration of completely new narratives about communities and economies, as opposed to lowest-common-denominator conclusions that oil is evil. These ambitions helped inspire “What Comes After Oil?,” a public roundtable hosted in August and organized by Szeman’s Petrocultures research cluster.

Attracting a sold-out crowd of 200 people to the Art Gallery of Alberta, the event featured contributions from academia, industry and government. Many of the exchanges were very fruitful, Szeman says, with thoughtful perspectives expressed by the panel and audience. He chalks such successes up to the way the issue is presented to people.

“When you say to them not ‘should we use oil or shouldn’t we’ — which I think is how celebrities often do it — but say ‘OK we’re an oil society, we’re a petroculture, we’ve made the kind of bad mistake of connecting ourselves to a non-renewable resource that has a significant environment impact’ there’s a kind of discussion that begins to emerge there that I don’t think happens otherwise,” he says.

The Next Steps

It’s a style of diplomacy that’s also been sought by the Alberta government’s recent climate change open houses, with hundreds of citizens showing up to the two events hosted in Calgary and Edmonton (those who weren’t able to make it have been invited to fill out online surveys).

Szeman says such popularity may suggest celebrities have contributed in positive ways despite a lack of nuance, with more citizens paying attention to the issues than ever before. When it comes down to it, celebrity visits are brimming with flaws, but they may be better than nothing at all.

“If we’re gong to make environmentalism — and particularly climate issues — a significant one, celebrities have a vital, important and I would say obligatory role to play,” Meister concludes. “Are we going to be able to depend on our politicians to bring legitimacy and a voice to this issue? I don’t know. Celebrities can grasp a lot of our public attention if the public sphere sees their work and the environment as significant.” 

Image: Bill Nye the Science Guy visits Fort McMurray. Photo by Mike Hudema via Twitter.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.