Capping a series of relatively strong initiatives on climate change, the Ontario government released its Climate Action Plan on June 8, and set the province if not the country on a challenging course. Projecting expenditures of $6 to 8 billion over the next five years, the Action Plan has placed the costs of decarbonization squarely on the public agenda and initiated an important set of conversations on the wisdom of taking a leadership position on climate. How much financial burden should Ontario citizens be expected to shoulder, in order to mitigate climate change? Is this plan sufficient to do Ontario’s share as a global citizen? Is the plan as effective and efficient as it could be? These conversations could well prepare the ground for what could become a key issue in the 2018 Ontario election.
IPPSO FACTO will provide more complete analysis of the action plan in the next issue. The preceding components of the government’s climate change framework, its legislation and the cap-and-trade regulation, are addressed in the articles that follow.