Federal government could deal with Trudeau-era climate policies 'over time,' energy minister says
OTTAWA — Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson did not commit to scrapping Trudeau-era climate policies that Alberta and Ontario want to see gone but said that the newly adopted major projects bill could pave the way to doing so 'over time.'
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Speaking in Calgary on Friday, Hodgson said the new legislation — which enables the cabinet to quickly approve projects of national interest by overriding federal laws — will empower the government to act swiftly and any legislative fine-tuning would come later.
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'We need to move quickly. What the… One Canadian Economy Act does is allows us to move quickly under this framework,' he told reporters in a press conference.
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'It allows us to do all the things we need to do in one centralized place, under one set of timelines, and to take those learnings to go back and deal with the other acts over time.'
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Hodgson was indirectly responding to a letter from the environment ministers of Alberta and Ontario, made public this week, who requested that the federal government repeal the Impact Assessment Act, clean electricity regulations and emissions cap, among others.
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In their letter, Rebecca Schultz and Todd J. McCarthy argued that those climate policies, implemented by the prior Liberal government, would 'undermine competitiveness, delay project development, and disproportionately harm specific provinces and territories.'
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'Canada is poised to be an economic superpower, but achieving that potential depends on strong, constitutionally grounded provincial authority over resource development and environmental management,' they wrote to Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin.
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Dabrusin, who met with her provincial and territorial counterparts in the Northwest Territories this week, said that the environment remains a priority for Prime Minister Mark Carney even as his government is getting ready to fast-track major projects.
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'We know it's very important to Canadians that as we do this, we're doing it properly and that we're doing it in a way that actually supports a strong country as a whole that takes into account our nature and the like,' she said in a press conference on Wednesday.
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