Quote:
Originally Posted by YOWetal
They're all net exporters so not sure how that'll work.
|
Depends on who and where. A country like India which exports services or a country like Bangladesh which exports textiles. We're not going to do all trying to get around their tariffs. China with manufactured goods? Sure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1overcosc
Yikes.. I didn't realize so much of the footprint was in so many hard-to-reduce things.
I guess we've already done the quickest win (no coal power..)
|
We've not even finished that quickest win. There's still 8-10 coal power plants in the country. Most are scheduled to close or convert to Natural Gas by 2030. Would they keep that promise if a new government scraps the Clean Electricity Standard? Hard to say.
What I would like to see from the Feds:
1) Much stricter building code. The fact that we can build buildings that can be heated and cooled passively, and don't do this is mind boggling. Not only should there be a much tighter building code, federal program eligibility like CMHC, should be based on meeting this higher standard.
2) Immediate effort for high speed rail in Quebec-Windsor and Calgary-Edmonton to substantially reduce aviation emissions in Canada. Half the air passengers in this country are just traveling in this Corridor. Not just construction of HSR, but full air-rail integration that allows for amalgamation of air services so that Calgary replaces Edmonton airport and Dorval replaces Ottawa airport.
3) Significant effort at building proper high quality active transport infrastructure. I'd like to see at least $1B per year to start on multi-use pathways, protected bike lanes, bicycle garages, etc. Strict design standards to qualify. If you put a painted bike lane on a stroad, you get nothing.
4) Electrification of school buses. To some extent, electrification of transit is proceeding. The feds could speed that up a little. But the place we're really behind is electrifying school buses. And these are much cheaper to pull off too. Quebec is really leading the way on this one.
$100M and they are electrification 65% of school buses by 2030. The long term health and education savings alone from electrifying buses would justify this.
5) 15 min neighbourhood requirement to qualify for transit grants. The federal government should not be paying for rail lines to Timbuktu so that Joe can drive his F150 to a rail station parking lot to commute and his Bronco for 90% of other trips. No 15 min city, no funding. They can still build the sprawl if they want. They'll pay for it.
6) Transit improvement program. Not just transit construction. But transit improvement. We've built a lot of transit in Canada over the decades. But a lot of it needs investment to improve safety, reliability and comfort. Like platform screen doors for subways or decent bus shelters with next bus information signs or wayfinding posts or universal payments. This stuff gets put off. But it's not all that expensive per se. But it needs to be done to actually increase transit as a preference.
7) EV charging investments at common use locations. It takes too long to add charging to every apartment. Give Loblaws and Sobeys subsidies for 100 kW chargers at their stores so that an apartment dweller can charge for the week while getting groceries.
These 7 things. If I add it all up, it's the feds spending something like $5-6B per year for 15-20 years. But the regulatory changes and investment would see substantial reductions in emissions along with a substantial increase in quality of life.