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Progress on cutting carbon emissions has slowed in Canada, according to the federal government’s annual reporting to the UN, and oil and gas emissions have continued to rise since the pandemic.
The latest National Inventory Report, which contains the government’s comprehensive accounting of emissions for 2024 along with improvements and revisions to previous years’ estimates, showed little change from the previous year across most of Canada’s economic sectors.
“Are we going to hit our 2030 target? No,” said Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute, which had released its own analysis and estimates of 2024 emissions last year.
“And the one thing we flagged as well in the past was the risk of emissions going the wrong way. The progress is fragile.”
The report was released on April 15, without any public announcement from the government or environment minister. That’s in contrast to last year, when the government hailed the 2023 emissions numbers as the lowest in decades excluding the pandemic.
This year, the 2024 emissions are a little lower at 685 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent — the measure used to track planet-heating gases including carbon dioxide, methane and others. In 2023, they were 687 MtCO2, revised slightly downward from last year’s announcement.
That translates to emissions being 10 per cent lower than 2005 levels. Canada’s 2030 target, which was set back in 2021 by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is to bring emissions down to 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
The target, put in law under the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, is Canada’s contribution to the international Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to limit the worst impacts of global warming by having all countries gradually bring down their emissions.
But the government’s own projections have shown the 2030 target is out of reach.
Electricity generation cuts emissions, oil and gas rises
A big driver of emissions reductions since 2005 has been electricity generation in Canada, which has slashed its emissions by 57 per cent.
This is because provinces have phased out coal plants and relied more heavily on hydropower and nuclear energy, as well as gas, which is a fossil fuel but burns cleaner than coal.
But even in electricity generation, the future is worrying.
Sawyer pointed out that more gas-powered electricity generation is coming online in Alberta and Ontario, while renewables like solar and wind are not growing at a pace that’s needed. That’s not just a carbon problem, he said, but also an affordability issue since burning gas to produce electricity is now more expensive than producing electricity from solar and wind installations.
Meanwhile, the largest source of emissions in Canada, the oil and gas industry, continues to grow. Oil and gas production has been rising since 2024 in Alberta and British Columbia, helped in part by the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the new LNG export terminal in Kitimat, B.C.
Oil and gas emissions overall peaked in Canada in 2014 at 230 MtCO2eq before falling to 203 MtCO2eq in 2020, and have grown since. However, emissions from production in the oilsands, primarily in northern Alberta, has been growing steadily. They rose from 33 MtCO2eq in 2005 to 92 MtCO2eq in 2024.
“It’s an old story, unfortunately. More oilsands production, with very few controls on their emissions, is offsetting the gains” made from reducing emissions through electric vehicles, greener buildings and cleaner electricity, Sawyer said.
As long as oilsands emissions grow without any action to tackle them, Sawyer said Canada’s emissions will continue to stay flat. “What we see today is not going to change much,” he said.