Que. minister, environment professor disagree on transparency, climate action plan

Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charrette speaks on climate change at a news conference, Wednesday, December 21, 2022 in Quebec City. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot

Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette has rejected the criticisms and accusations of an energy specialist who resigned from the Legault government's Advisory Committee on Climate Change.

He criticized "a kind of censorship," a lack of vision and transparency, ineffective programs and a failure to question the way Quebecers consume energy.

The minister said in a news scrum on Wednesday that members of the Advisory Committee on Climate Change, a body tasked with advising Charette, are "completely" independent.

"The government does not interfere in any way in the committee's activities. In fact, it has produced a number of reports in recent years, which we have been able to analyze carefully, and we have already implemented a number of the measures contained in those reports," the minister said in defence.

He added that "in no way are we interfering in the governance of the committee, in the subjects under study by the committee."

CENSORSHIP AND LACK OF TRANSPARENCY

Pierre-Olivier Pineau resigned from the committee a week ago and has a different version than that of the minister.

On Tuesday, the professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal and holder of the Chair in Energy Sector Management criticized "a kind of censorship," a lack of vision and transparency, and ineffective programs to combat climate change.

The committee was recently working to produce an independent assessment of the government's climate action.

According to Pineau, it would have been appropriate for the committee to look at some of the spending of the Green Fund, now the Electrification and Climate Change Fund (ECCF), which has come in for criticism.

Last year, the Commissioner for Sustainable Development, Janique Lambert, pointed out that 80 per cent of planned spending under the ECCF was earmarked for projects that "lacked adequate indicators and targets."

Pineau wanted the committee to produce a summary of the criticisms of the ECCF, the effectiveness of the various programs, their indicators and targets, "because Quebec is not reducing its greenhouse gas emissions as it should."

He believes that Environment Ministry employees, who were responsible for documenting the committee's opinions in order to assess the government's actions, "did not have the latitude to put forward and document the ideas" that were discussed within the Advisory Committee on Climate Change.

"I had the impression that a kind of censorship was being exercised, that the themes we had worked on as a sub-committee were no longer to be found in the documents we were discussing, and that troubled me and I had given up hope that the committee would be able to do independent critical work on the assessment of the Quebec government's climate action," said Pineau.

According to Charrette, "these are the criticisms of an individual who is no longer a member of the committee today."

The minister added that he was in communication with the ministry, which spoke the members of the committee.

"What we have reiterated to its director, to its chairman, Mr. Webster, is that the government will always be there to respond to the needs expressed to us, in terms of manpower or resources," said Charette.

The Climate Change Advisory Committee is chaired by Alain Webster, a professor in the Department of Economics and the Centre universitaire de formation en environnement et développement durable at the Université de Sherbrooke.

The Canadian Press attempted to obtain an interview with Webster and the other members of the committee but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.

Pineau, who co-edits the annual État de l'énergie au Québec, described the committee as "dysfunctional and unproductive."

He also criticized the fact that the government's programs to combat climate change do not allow us to question our relationship with energy consumption.

According to the professor, "to make an energy transition, we have to go beyond simply improving the technical efficiency of the equipment around us, we have to rethink our energy consumption, and that's what these programmes don't do."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Aug. 30, 2023.