OTTAWA - The Harper government might be overestimating how much its climate-change plan will lower greenhouse gases, says a federal advisory panel.
Flaws in government calculations could skew projections around the Tories' green policies, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy says in a report to be released Saturday.
"Some problems persist with how individual policy measures are calculated and with their projected emission reductions," the report says.
"Individual policy measures continue to be presented without these sources of overestimation adequately being taken into account."
However, a spokeswoman for Environment Minister John Baird said the government is confident in its estimates.
"The modelling that the government of Canada uses ... is just that, modelling. It changes year by year, depending on the different data that we get," Amanda Galbraith said.
The roundtable did praise the Conservatives for being more transparent in their climate-change reporting this year and for fleshing out their policies.
The government has pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020 through a handful of measures. But it has abandoned Canada's commitment to the Kyoto protocol, which requires much deeper cuts.
Part of the Tory plan calls for "intensity targets" on big emitters starting in 2010 and lasting until at least 2017.
Intensity-based targets link greenhouse-gas reductions to a company's industrial output, meaning overall emissions can still rise if a producer is, for example, getting more energy-efficient use out of a barrel of oil.
Companies that fall short of those targets will be able to buy exemptions through investments in the government's green technology fund or a cap-and-trade scheme.
It's difficult to measure the actual emissions reductions that might result from something like the technology fund, said Mark Jaccard, a Simon Fraser University professor and roundtable member.
"If the cap is not a real hard cap but is an intensity cap, so that it depends on growth rates of different sectors . . . then you have to speculate on it.
"We thought it was on the optimistic side in terms of how much reductions would actually happen."
The government is required by law to submit a plan to the roundtable each year showing how it will meet its commit to the Kyoto Protocol.
The Tories maintain that the Kyoto target -- lowering greenhouse-gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012 -- is unattainable after years of inaction by their Liberal predecessors.
