The Government of Quebec recently unveiled the annual update of the Implementation Plan for its Plan for a Green Economy 2030 (PEV 2030) for the period 2023-2028. This implementation plan aims to present the various actions that the government intends to deploy to achieve the objectives set in the ENP 2030. According to the government, additional efforts, supported by expenditures of 9 billion dollars over five years, would make it possible to achieve 60% of the 2030 climate target.
We can doubt it. Because, according to the Action Plan1 for the application of the recommendations of the Auditor General, prepared by the Ministry of the Environment, the Fight against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks (MLCCFP), obtained following a request for access to the information, this result is highly questionable.
This is a very reassuring revelation when we know that the last Action Plan on Climate Change 2013-2020 (PACC 2013-2020) had limited effects on the reduction of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, i.e. less than 2 Mt (megaton) compared to the approximately 80 Mt emitted annually in Quebec.
The MLCCFP therefore announces the failure of the Green Economy Implementation Plan.
A bit of context
When he came to power in 2018, Prime Minister François Legault exclaimed that the Green Fund (now the Electrification and Climate Change Fund) was “managed haphazardly” and that it was necessary to ensure that “every dollar invested will go the furthest to reduce GHGs”.
At the time, the Green Fund Management Board assessed “that out of a total of 185 actions, only 71 deserved to be pursued”.
To address this shortcoming, the Department indicated in its recent Action Plan sent to the Auditor General that it would adopt “a methodology to assess the overall contribution of actions” and that the evaluation of program performance would comply to a management framework.
However, when we refer to the directive linked to this management framework2it is stated that “program evaluation is not […] results monitoring”. It is therefore out of the question to assess whether the actions actually deliver the promised GHG reductions.
The Management Framework indicates that “an evaluation framework for the Implementation Plan for the period 2021-2026 must be tabled in 2024 […] and an evaluation report, in 2025”.
This framework, we are told, would be a tool that aims to “put in place a monitoring process upstream of the development of any intervention” and would constitute “a practice facilitating the measurement of the results of a program or project “.
However, this tool still needs to be developed. In short, the recently announced update to the Implementation Plan is not based on any real evaluation of individual actions, nor on any accountability mechanism that ensures that “every dollar invested goes the furthest to reduce GHGs”. “, as Mr. Legault wished.
The actions of the last 2013-2020 climate plan did not make it possible to achieve its overall target of 3.6 Mt. According to the government, it is expected that the reductions envisaged in the current plan (2023-2028) will ultimately be “quantitatively comparable”.
This is a very disappointing revelation in a context of climate emergency.
The solution
Madness is doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result. The current approach perpetuates the inefficiencies of the past, with the difference that there is more money in the Fund since its inception in 2006.
In finance, when a stock market performs poorly, we withdraw our investments and place them elsewhere. In the case of the Electrification and Climate Change Fund (FECC), the government renews and refinances actions that ultimately bring very unsatisfactory results.
The MELCCFP must be accountable for the poor performance of its actions from which we would be entitled to see results. The solution ? An appearance by officials of this department before the Committee on Public Administration. This would represent a first step to rectify the situation.
Without an independent and transparent mechanism to track the individual performance of the hundreds of actions planned to reduce our GHGs, government climate plans will simply continue to deliver little reduction for “every dollar invested”. We are still far from the promises of Mr. Legault.