Industry leaders nervous about new clean air bill

OTTAWA - A newly drafted version of the minority Conservative government's clean air legislation has produced an unrealistic plan that would cost billions of dollars to the Canadian economy, industry leaders said Friday.
The changes, forced through a Commons committee by the three opposition parties, propose tough pollution-reduction targets in the legislation, Bill C-30, along with penalties or fines for industries that don't comply.
"It is unachievable, and nothing other than a tax on economic activity in Canada," said Pierre Alvarez, the president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. "The impact on every single industrial sector would be very, very significant. How much and how many? Clearly, we don't know at this point in time. But if this goes through, it will affect the investment decisions of whether companies choose to do activities that are energy intensive in Canada (versus) having it done somewhere else."
Auto-industry representatives also expressed doubts about changes in the legislation that would set new fuel-efficiency standards, which would be benchmarked against leading jurisdictions in the world, instead of on the North American average.
Mark Nantais, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, said such changes would hurt the local industry, which has been integrated with the U.S. market since 1965. "That (revised bill) could end up having some perverse impacts, in terms of fleet turnover, and the ability of people to afford these vehicles," he said, noting the more efficient cars perform better in foreign markets with higher fuel prices.
Conservatives on the committee voted against the majority of the changes to the legislation.
As well, the government has not yet decided whether it will allow the bill to move through the Commons with new measures, which include Canada's short-term international commitments under the Kyoto protocol to cut the pollution that causes global warming by more than 35 per cent.
Environment Minister John Baird said the government would soon introduce its own set of regulations for industry, but he refused to say whether he would allow the revised legislation to turn into a matter of confidence that could force an election. "Listen, I'm not going to go there," he said Friday after question period.
But environmental groups said the government should accept the bill, while praising the work of the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrats who rewrote the legislation in the past few weeks and renamed it the Clean Air and Climate Change Act.
"The committee has squeezed the hot air out of the Clean Air Act bill and has replaced it with a real bill - with the real deal," said Stephen Hazell, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. "We now have fixed caps on greenhouse gas emissions, rather than the fake caps or the emissions intensity targets that the (Conservative) government has proposed."
But Liberal environment critic David McGuinty said Baird seems to be more interested in "buffoonery" than he is in cleaning up the air and fighting climate change.
"Every answer I hear to every question put to him is a bobbing and weaving and huffing and puffing and trying to blow the house down," said McGuinty. "I have not heard a single substantive comment from this minister on C-30 since this process began."

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