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This paper asks whether or not the political party in power has makes a difference in terms of Canadian international environmental diplomacy and policy. While numerous international issues could be used in this paper, the focus will be on the evolution of climate change policy from 1988 to present. This time period allows us to include the Mulroney Progressive Conservative era, the Chrétien and Martin Liberal eras and the present Harper Conservative government. It will be seen that there has been a change in the diplomacy with a significant shift in tone with the arrival of the Harper Conservatives. And while the tone has changed, it is difficult to argue that the policy implementation has fundamentally changed over time. Indeed, we move from the agenda setting of the Mulroney Conservatives to the signature, ratification and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol under the Liberals and then the Harper Conservatives, but the end result is quite similar when we consider emissions reductions as our benchmark. Environmental imperatives do not drive Canadian climate change policy, regardless of the tone of the international diplomacy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia, Canada, and the United States share a number of important attributes. They are all English speaking former British colonies. They are continent sized countries with substantial portions of their economies devoted to natural resource extraction and processing. In relationship to climate change, they are also substantial emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, and all three have faced political struggles related to domestic and international climate policy. The United States and Australia are alone among the developed states in refusing to be bound by the Kyoto Protocol. Canada has ratified the Protocol, but its emissions have continued to rise precipitously, and it will be unable to meet its Kyoto commitments without generous use of the flexibility mechanisms contained in the Kyoto Protocol. Given the similarities in the situations of these three states, how do we explain the variation in domestic and foreign policy responses to climate change? This paper will argue that the interaction between international norms and domestic norms fundamentally shaped the domestic framing of climate change as a political problem. The paper will explore the initial framing of climate change as a political problem in each country and will emphasize the role of international and domestic actors in defining the problem and its political significance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada's North is the frontline in the global climate change challenge. Nowhere else in our country, or on our planet, are the early effects of climate change so plain. Nowhere else in Canada are communities and traditional ways of life so clearly at risk due to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the policy agenda's greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive countries in Canada and the U.S. It mentions that federal government focused on the risks of climate change. It states that sub-federal jurisdictions focused on enacting policies from emissions trading and carbon taxes to efficiency standards and renewable electricity fuel.

In the wake of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the American and Canadian governments have taken different environmental policy pathsâ€"Canada has ratified the agreement while the United States has not. But while officially approving the emissions plan, the Canadian government has not acted on its aims and objectives. Meanwhile, the United States has supported other environmental agreements, such as the APEC Sydney Declaration for Climate Change, also signed by Canada. These redirections and evasions serve to rhetorically undermine and defocus the Kyoto initiatives. In both countries, approaches to climate change have been politically and rhetorically opportunistic. In light of the ambiguous defeat of Kyoto in Canada and the United States a political discourse has emerged that has adopted the term “Kyoto” as a rhetorical tool to describe poor environmental policy. Using the debate transcripts from the American House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons this interdisciplinary and international panel will investigate the rhetoric of Kyoto from three unique perspectives: that of a rhetorician, that of a political scientist, and that of a biologist. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As economist Nicholas Stern declared in his much-publicized report to the U.K. government in the fall of 2006, climate change is "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen." In order to address this global market failure, economists generally favour two possible policy responses. First, by setting an annual cap on global emissions and requiring emitters to purchase emissions credits either from a regulator or from other emitters, so-called emissions-trading regimes create a price for carbon emissions which creates market incentives for emitters to reduce their emissions and for individuals and enterprises to develop alternative low-carbon technologies. Alternatively, governments can set this price directly through a tax on carbon emissions or (as a close proxy for these emissions) on the carbon content of fossil fuels. Over the past 15 years, governments have experimented with each of these policy approaches.While the ultimate policy goal of capping annual emissions might suggest that an emissions-trading system is preferable to a tax regime, the enormous political challenges to the creation of a global trading system - exemplified by the limited success of the Kyoto Protocol - suggests that carbon taxation might be a more politically feasible strategy to encourage emission reductions over the short term. In addition, as the Stern Report explains, uncertainties about the social costs of carbon emissions and the costs of adaptation to climate change over time might also favour carbon taxation over emissions trading as an initial strategy to reduce GHG emissions. As well, uncertainty about the price for carbon emissions that might emerge under an emissions-trading regime has caused some sectors of the business community to favour a carbon tax which establishes a clear and certain price for emissions.The purpose of this paper is to inform the debate about carbon taxation in Canada and other developed countries by explaining the theoretical case for carbon taxation and reviewing the design and experience with carbon taxation in countries such as the Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. The paper should be approximately 40-60 double-spaced pages in length. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in December 2002 was something of a surprise for several reasons. First, in light of even greater emissions growth than anticipated when Canada signed Kyoto in 1997, compliance with Kyoto would require a very deep reduction in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to 35% below the “business-as-usual” baseline by 2010. Second, a commitment to Kyoto could be expected to hurt Canada’s economic interests as a major fossil fuel producer and exporter. Third, Canada’s open economy, with exports accounting for 40% of GDP, was threatened by a regime that does not demand comparable emissions reductions from competitors, whether in developing countries or, more importantly, in Canada’s largest trading partner, the United States, which confirmed in 2001 that it would not ratify Kyoto. In light of these factors, it is not surprising that the federal government faced virtually unanimous opposition to ratification from the Canadian business community. Moreover, since the natural resources in question, including oil, gas, and coal, are owned by provincial governments, most provinces were also adamantly opposed to ratification, the exception being two provinces with extensive hydroelectric potential. That Canada ratified Kyoto despite these challenges represented a triumph of commitments both to environmental sustainability and multilateralism over economic interests and political institutions. However, this triumph of ideas was facilitated by an unusual set of circumstances, in particular a Prime Minister willing to pursue bold policy initiatives at the end of a long political career. That said, institutional and political obstacles reasserted themselves with respect to implementation before the ink was dry on Canada’s ratification papers. Political concessions quietly negotiated by the federal government with the business community in the lead-up to ratification have rendered it impossible for Canada to comply with Kyoto through domestic actions alone. Compliance will thus require reliance on Kyoto’s international flexibility mechanisms for a significant fraction, possibly more than half, of Canada’s reductions. Yet the notion of investing in international credits is politically unpopular in Canada. The Conservative government, elected in January 2006, has acknowledged that Canada will not comply with Kyoto, and begun quietly dismantling climate change programs put in place by their predecessors. While Canada’s surprising resolve thus has been undercut by traditional power politics, it remains to be seen whether the ideational commitment to Kyoto will be rendered entirely symbolic, or whether Canada’s continued participation in the Kyoto process will place it on a path for greater action than it might otherwise have taken, if one less aggressive than promised at the time of ratification. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is Canada lagging on climate change? Are we rejecting the green environmental internationalism of the past? The answer to these two questions is very simply: yes. At the same time, it will be argued that lagging is not new and that green environmenta ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is causing rapid loss in Arctic seaice, raising the prospect of international shipping through the Northwest Passage within decades, perhaps even years. This poses serious security and environmental risks to both Canada and the United States, and yet the two countries are locked in a diplomatic dispute with respect to the legal status of the waterway. In this presentation, a Canadian expert on the law of the sea of the Arctic will argue that the Canadian position--that the Northwest passage constitutes Canadian internal waters subject to the full force of Canadian domestic law--serves the national interests of the United States far better than reliance on lax international legal regimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]