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In Canada, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to remain high despite the federal government's commitment to reduce GHG emissions. Environmental policy across Canadian provinces has largely lacked consistency with some provinces implementing targeted policy such as carbon taxes while others have strongly resisted the federal government's attempts to encourage such policy. This study examines the impact of environmental policy on GHG gas emissions across Canadian provinces with policy uniquely measured by public and business sector spending on environmental protection as well as notable province-specific policies. An extended STIRPAT model is specified with the inclusion of proxies for environmental policy using panel data from Canada's ten provinces from 1995 to 2019. The cointegration and the error correction modelling approaches are employed to estimate the non-stationary panel data. A pooled mean group estimation is applied to provide short run and long run coefficients. The findings indicate that although per capita GDP is the main driver of GHG emissions in Canada, environmental policy has a significant mitigating effect, as shown by the negative association between emissions and private and public sector spending on environmental protection in the long run. Furthermore, provinces with targeted policies, such as Ontario's coal phase-out and British Columbia's carbon tax, experienced significant emissions reductions. The theoretical implication is the successful addition of policy variables to the STIRPAT model, providing the model a new application for future research. [Display omitted] • Assess the impact of environmental protection policies on per capita greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. • Utilize public and private expenditures on environmental protection, along with provincial policies. • Extend the STIRPAT model to incorporate environmental protection policies in an empirical model. • Demonstrate a significant negative relationship between environmental protection policies and GHG emissions. • Offer insights with implications for global environmental sustainability efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES the construction of a shale gas industry, including the proposed development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, in British Columbia, Canada, and focuses on state-capital interrelations surrounding its development. In addition to structural power, it traces the political reach and influence of gas and oil corporations over state bodies and the policy planning process in the province via political party donations and corporate lobbying. These complementary endeavours aimed at entrenching business as usual pose significant barriers to a rapid and socially just transition to a post- or low-carbon economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies notable trends in environmental policy surrounding oil and gas development in Canada’s leading producing provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan) in the period from 2009 to 2014: environmental policy streamlining in particular via the consolidation of environmental policymaking in development-oriented agencies, the continuation and raising of barriers to public involvement in decisions on oil and gas activity, and the avoidance of cumulative impact assessment. These trends signal policy convergence facilitating oil and gas development during a period of accelerating extraction and weakening federal environmental policy. More broadly, this confirms a pattern of conventional politics in energy-dependent subnational governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explains the findings of the MC3 Project (Meeting the Climate Change Challenge). This project brought together over 100 researchers, practitioners, civil-society leaders, and policy-makers, led by researchers from Royal Roads University, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia, with 12 major research partners from the public and private sectors, including the Union of British Columbia municipalities. Researchers conducted a detailed evaluation of 11 leading, yet different, municipalities across the province to identify the leading innovators and innovations on climate action. The case studies revealed the following key drivers of innovation, in order of prominence: the legislative and policy framework, supported by provincially led incentives and tools, access to partnership funding and intermediary support, and framing the issue as critically important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are increasingly using public-private partnerships (P3s) to draw the private sector into more active participation in infrastructure development. Climate action initiatives have not typically yielded profitable results for the private sector, and might therefore constrain the placing of conditions by governments on P3 arrangements. This article investigates a major P3 infrastructure project in British Columbia - the Canada Line extension to Vancouver's urban rail transit network - and concludes that the P3 organization did not constrain the government's capacity to pursue policy objectives for climate action. This counterintuitive result occurred because public sector leadership enabled an effective engagement with environmental policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007-08, British Columbia implemented two significant climate policies: the first broadly based carbon tax and the first almost 100-percent 'clean' electricity standard in North America. We describe the key design characteristics of these policies and analyse them against the criteria of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, economic efficiency, administrative feasibility, and public acceptance. We find that the clean electricity standard is estimated to reduce four to six times more emissions per year by 2020 than the carbon tax, but at an average cost per tonne of CO2 reduced that is significantly higher than the carbon tax at its current level. Interestingly, the clean electricity standard achieves higher and steadier levels of public acceptance, which might be attributed to its lack of visibility, relative to the carbon tax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British Columbia's introduction in 2008 of a revenue-neutral carbon tax shift was controversial. This analysis compares changes in fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and gross domestic product (GDP) between British Columbia and the rest of Canada. It finds that in the four years since the tax was introduced, British Columbia's per capita consumption of fuels subject to the tax has declined by 19 percent compared to the rest of Canada. At the same time, its economy has kept pace with the rest of Canada. British Columbia's experience mirrors the European experience with carbon tax shifting and should inform the federal debate on climate change policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional and institutional legacies were combined to create a very decentralized forest policy sector in Canada. Where coherent policy requires a national response-as is the case with adaptation to climate change-the critical challenge is to locate the relevant decentralized policy capacity and steer it toward meeting national objectives. While there is some evidence that significant policy capacity exists in provincial forest and resource management departments, climate change adaptation has led to an expansion of departmental mandates that is not being addressed by better coordination of the available policy capacity. The relevant federal agencies are not well represented in information networks and forest policy workers report lower levels of internal and external networking than workers in related policy subsectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the creation of conservation areas has been a significant and contested trend in resource peripheries around the globe, embracing the “remapping” of resource extents, tenures, and values and thereby land use patterns and regional development trajectories. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as key actors in the conflicts underlying this remapping, as advocates of environmental values and opponents of vested economic and political interests engaged in large-scale resource commodification. Remapping is contentious because it is inescapably normative, rendering moral judgments and alterations of property rights and the meaning of sustainable development. The outcomes of remapping are highly contingent, driven by environmental bargaining processes that describe the formal and informal interactions among ENGOs, industrial interests, different levels of government, and other actors with conflicting interests, strategies, and alliances. This article explores how conflicts were resolved in the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's central coast. Conceptually, the stakeholder model approach to resource conflict is elaborated by emphasizing the roles of ENGOs as advocates and representatives of environmental values within scientific boundary organizations created specifically to be key facilitators in the bargaining process. The study draws on forest policy documents, records of negotiation, surveys of the region's ecological and socioeconomic structures, and field visits. The analysis reveals the Coast Information Team as the multirepresentative scientific boundary organization that developed a shared, accepted multilayered geographic information system of the region. This map provided a “shared currency” and the basis for agreement regarding (1) land use zoning at multiple scales, (2) ecosystem-based management, and (3) conservation mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a conceptual examination into the labor dynamics and environmental politics of the tree planting industry of British Columbia. Discussion is given outlining the structure of the silviculture industry at the beginning of the 21st century, highlighting conflicts between the nation's environmental protection policies and the economic labor demands of the province. The formation and influence of the Industrial, Wood, and Allied Workers of Canada (IWA) and the Canadian Reforestation and Environmental Workers Society (CREWS) in the sector's development since the 1990s is then analyzed.

For all its challenges to and disruptions of the divisions within academic disciplines, the study of environmental politics remains constrained by the assumption of sovereignty, especially as sovereignty is expressed in the spatial jurisdictions of the modern state. The practice of environmental politics, however, is not nearly so bounded by these jurisdictions. Not only do environmental struggles frequently evade or cross territorial boundaries, but they often constitute new political spaces and institutions that effectively reshape forms of sovereign authority. Through a close reading of the campaign against clearcut logging in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, this article identifies and explores some of the challenges posed by the forms of authority that are being constituted through these struggles. It argues that if the study of environmental politics fails to critically engage the spatial assumptions of modern sovereignty and to focus more specifically on the ways in which environmental movements necessarily subvert these assumptions, it faces a real danger of misunderstanding what may be the most important effects of environmental politics on contemporary political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1995 the provincial government of British Columbia, Canada, passed new legislation encouraging regional districts to prepare Regional Growth Strategies. The strategies were to be means of coordinating municipal action on regional issues. They were also meant to facilitate pursuit of sustainability objectives, including reducing urban sprawl, protecting environmentally sensitive areas, providing affordable housing and decreasing pollution. This paper examines the experience so far in one region that chose to prepare a growth strategy: the Capital Regional District (CRD) at the south end of Vancouver Island. Growth-management planning in the CRD has been and remains both critical and difficult. The region expects a substantial population increase over the next couple of decades and has a limited land base for urban expansion. Man), citizens recognise that their quality of life is high, but vulnerable and, as a result, public support for effective growth management is stronger in the CRD than in many other provincial growth areas. However, BC does not have a tradition of strong regional governance and the CRD as a regional authority is the creature of sixteen municipalities and electoral areas. Seven years into the process, effective growth management still faces substantial challenges, including the persistent jurisdictional protectionism of CRD municipalities. Nevertheless, there have been positive achievements and an admirable diversity of individuals, organisations and initiatives continue to push municipal and regional officials towards a more sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the social construction of environmental issues through the publication of letters to the editor concerning the proposed logging in the Carmanah Valley of British Columbia. Issues concerning the publication of the 'green mail' or letters on environmental issues; Role of the mass media in directing popular discussion about environmental events and issues; Factors used in news reporting to contextualize environmental issues; Limitations of the newspaper as a medium appropriate to environmental coverage.