I’ve heard that Canada’s not doing enough at these international meetings. How is Canada blocking progress?

• Canada’s climate targets don’t meet the science, which tells us we need our global warming pollution to be at least 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 to have a chance at keeping our climate safe. The Government of Canada’s targets are set at 3% below 1990 levels by 2020, when they should be at the high end of the 25-40% range. If the whole world followed Canada’s targets, we’d be committing the planet to extremely dangerous levels of warming that could result in millions of deaths and displaced persons.
• The Government of Canada doesn’t have a credible plan to meet even our current, inadequate global warming pollution targets.
• Canada uses the year 2006 to calculate its emissions from. This is a problem because the previous international agreement that we signed onto, the Kyoto Protocol, specifies that the starting year to calculate emissions (the “base year”) is 1990. By using the year 2006, Canada is confusing the process.
• The Government of Canada is fighting against a fair and equitable global warming treaty - we are asking countries that have contributed less to the global warming problem to take action first, even though we have not shown them that we are willing to lead by reducing our global warming pollution.
• The Government of Canada is not willing to provide the amount of financial help necessary to the protect the poorer countries that are being impacted most by global warming, even though those vulnerable countries have done little to cause the problem.
• One reason Canada is putting forward these obstructive positions is to protect the massive expansion of the tar sands, a dirty oil megaproject in Alberta. The tar sands, growing at a pace and scale that’s out of control, could produce three times more pollution than at present by 2020 – and this is at a time when we need to be reducing our global warming pollution drastically.