Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Justin Trudeau’s environmental policy is often either purchasing the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX) or expanding Canada’s LNG sector. Yet Jennifer Lash, a former senior advisor with Environment and Climate Change Canada, speaks of his accomplishments in the fight against climate change. In this morning’s interview, she explains the rationale behind Liberal environmental policies. As it is actually quite simple once you get the underlying theme, Cortes Currents is calling it ‘Liberal Environmental Policies for Dummies.’

Jennifer Lash: “There’s two ways that you can address climate change. One is through the policies that reduce the emissions here in Canada, and the other is by taking action to leave fossil fuels in the ground so that they're not even extracted.”

“Both approaches have merit, so I'm not here to just say whether one is right or wrong. Both are out there, and there is a substantial part of society that's very concerned about how much fossil fuels we're taking out of the ground. When TMX was purchased, that provided space for the oil sands to expand.”

“When LNG is approved, it obviously increases the extraction of LNG, which is then burned in other countries. We're all trying to meet our Paris targets; that doesn't count emissions burned in other countries. So with the Paris Agreement, we are responsible for the emissions that we generate here in Canada. When the LNG is exported and burned in China, China has to account for those emissions. It's just the math of how the system works. As a major oil and gas supplier globally, Canada has a moral responsibility for how much fossil fuels we put into the system.”

“There is also the argument that at this moment in time, if we leave our LNG in the ground, another country is going to take it. So it's not like global emissions are, or the global supply of LNG is going to go down. It's going to go up. It's just that we leave it in the ground and don't have the economic benefit, and another country does. That's just the lay of the land of the issues that surround the climate debate.”

“When Trudeau came into power, he and his various environment ministers—Minister McKenna, Minister Wilkinson, and then Minister Guilbeault—all played a part in delivering these policies. They put together the first national climate plan, which was designed to reduce our emissions. We call it the PCF, the Pan-Canadian Framework on Climate Change and the Economy.”

“The ability to get all the provinces to sign onto that—namely to get Alberta to sign onto that—required a pipeline. So that was the first grand bargain that the Liberal government did with Alberta. You can say it was really bad to get TMX, and I'm leaving out all the ocean risk issues—that's a whole other interview as a threat to the ocean—but in terms of climate, the pipeline was approved in order for us to get a national climate plan, which we did get.”

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