Canada could do more to protect its natural landscape, say experts

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Canada boasts some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, but do we need to do a better job of protecting it? A new environmental report card is providing a global snapshot and the overall picture for our country is pretty dismal.

Canada has been given a ‘D’ grade by the Conference Board of Canada, ranking 14th out of 16 nations on climate change, air pollution, and freshwater management. Only the US and Australia fare worse.
Our premier often touts our environmental performance here in BC, but the report finds there are improvements to be made here as well.

“BC compared to other provinces ranked third, after Ontario and Quebec. The comparison also includes 15 countries, and when you compare with the rest of the world, BC ends up with a ‘C’ on a scorecard,” says Louis Theriault, Vice-President of Public Policy with the Conference Board of Canada.

He says there are a number of things BC does well.

“One of them is electricity from renewals from hydro. There are no greenhouse gas emissions coming from electricity generation, largely. In the province, there are other indicators where BC does OK.” For example, sulphur oxide emissions, so no coal burning, so those things are really, really good. On the other hand, there’s extremely high energy intensity, so BC consumes a lot of energy. That’s a contributor to the overall decline in the ranking. There are examples of specific indicators, and probably the most important one in terms of setting the overall stage for how BC manages its entire environmental footprint, the energy intensity’s clearly an area to pay attention to.”

Theriault adds nationally, energy intensity is an issue as well.

“Canada has been built on its resource base, we’re endowed with a lot of natural resources, and it takes a lot of energy to extract these resources. And most of the production coming from the natural resource sector, forestry, oil, gas, etcetera, mining, it’s exported after. We’re producing goods and products that are needed elsewhere on the planet, but we bear the environmental costs, so to speak, by using a lot of energy and also emitting a lot of greenhouse gas emissions — that’s the case for Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular. It’s also part of the distance, it’s a large country, so we travel a lot and a lot of the energy use and the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from the transportation sector and because we travel long distances, that’s a contributor.”

Theriault adds it’s not that we don’t use state of the art technology but rather by the nature of our structure, it’s challenging when we set goals to reduce our environmental footprint.