Saskatchewan Environment Minister Nancy Heppner just upgraded a terrible policy goal to simply bad. Prior to the 2007 election, her Saskatchewan Party pledged to uphold the NDP's target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Thankfully, however, Heppner recently abandoned the plan that would have reduced GHGs by 32 per cent by 2020, noting it would have placed “a pretty heavy burden on industry.” If only it had ended there.

Shortly thereafter, Heppner announced the province would embrace Ottawa’s lower, though still punitive, target of reducing carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. Although she defended the move with good rhetoric, her words could equally be used against the new plan.

“One of the assumptions of the [NDP economic and environmental] modeling is that every business has the ability to pay. That’s simply not the case,” said Heppner, regarding the 32 per cent target. “We’ve heard from companies who said that they wouldn’t be able to meet those targets. The financial hardship was too great.”

Heppner later added, “You could easily reduce the emissions if you shut all business down, but that’s not the approach our government wants to take.”

No kidding. Yet, according to Heppner, GHG emissions rose by 62 per cent during the 16 year NDP era. If emissions could rise so drastically with static population size and modest economic development, the draconian and expensive measures required to actually reduce emissions would be nothing short of scary.

Unfortunately, national and international politics are exerting a negative pressure on our province that deserves full resistance. Until recently, Prime Minister Harper had called for intensity-based targets that called for lower carbon emissions relative to industrial production, not a hard-cap based on total emissions. This approach would have allowed for industry to continue to grow, albeit with difficulty.

However, it seems Harper has given way to cues from Washington. U.S. President Barrack Obama pushed for a hard cap on emissions during his January visit to Ottawa, and by now federal policy is being expressed in the same terms. Carbon emissions, added every time we exhale, will be reduced 20 per cent, industry or no industry.

Thus, recently, Finance Minister Flaherty announced that the federal government would impose carbon emission limits on coal-fired power plants, even though these provide more than 70 per cent of the power supply of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. If utilities fail to reduce emissions, they must buy hot-air credits from somewhere else to compensate.

The government's estimated cost to industry of $4.3 billion may be too small. It will take $1.4 billion and a 30 per cent reduction in output to transform Unit 3 of Boundary Dam power plant. If the six units at Boundary Dam produce just 30 per cent of the provincial power supply, how many billions would it take to transform them all? Even the government's suggested power rate hike of 20 per cent over ten years wouldn't do that.

Even while Heppner defended the new environmental policy, she actually showed the province has a choice. Regarding her revised plan to reduce emissions, she said, “It continues to be one of the – if not the most – stringent plan put forward by a province.”

In an effort to stop the exhaust, the government has put a banana in the tailpipe. Too bad that moves like that are doomed to stall our economic engine. Is that what we want--to be left stranded in the cold?