QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Environment and Climate Change
Climate Plan
November 22, 2023
Thank you for being with us today, minister. This morning, Canada’s new Chief Climate Negotiator, Michael Bonser, spoke with our Senators for Climate Solutions group. He reminded us that according to the latest global stock‑taking, we, Canada, and the world are not tracking well against our Paris Agreement commitments. Clearly, increasing ambition and having viable plans to meet that ambition will be key.
As you head into COP 28 in Dubai next week, minister, can you tell us what Canada’s top priorities or must-achieve items are, and also the biggest challenges you expect to face at COP 28?
Thank you, senator. As Mr. Bonser might have told you, Canada has been asked by the COP 28 president to serve as co-facilitator for COP 28. We are one of 8 countries out of 194 that have been asked to do that. I was on a call at six o’clock this morning with the COP 28 president, along with a number of other ministers from around the world, to start looking at what is absolutely needed to come out of COP 28 in Dubai with a successful agreement.
It’s a combination of more ambition when it comes to mitigation. How do we continue and accelerate reducing our emissions globally? We need to do a better job of supporting the Global South on adaptation to climate change. Many of these countries are feeling the impacts, and they are on the front line of climate impacts.
We also need to support financing. As you may have seen recently in the news, under the supervision of Germany and Canada, we have been working for the last three years to ensure that developed nations achieve the $100-billion goal that we set in Copenhagen in 2009. According to the OECD, we have reached that goal. We reached it last year, and we’ve reached it this year. We were supposed to reach it in 2020. This is a fundamentally important element of the negotiations going into COP 28. In fact, the COP 28 president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, publicly saluted that achievement by countries. These are some of the issues we will need to tackle.
You didn’t get to the issue of challenges.
At COP 28, you’ll be sitting down with some large emitting countries like China and India, countries critical to the global climate equation and countries with which Canada has strained relationships. In this context, can you speak about the importance of climate diplomacy and how Canada will approach this work?
Thank you. I think our environmental diplomacy is an integral part of our overall diplomacy. In fact, the United Nations turned to us last year to host COP 15, which we did in close collaboration with China despite some of the tensions we have had with this country. Nevertheless, we were able to come to what many consider a historic agreement to protect nature, which is what led me to go China this summer so that we can continue this collaboration.
It is now the largest emitter of greenhouse gas on the planet. We can’t ignore a country like China, nor can we ignore a country like India. We need to find ways to work with them and find solutions, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.
