Don Martin: Trudeau government takes a chainsaw to its tree-planting promise

Through all the confusion, controversy and consultations, one giant green hope stood out in Canada’s fight against climate change: We’ll always have the trees.

Two billion carbon-absorbing trees to be planted by 2030 was the eye-catching Trudeau government promise from four years ago.

It made so much more sense than everything else. There’d be none of this carbon-taxing of energy linked to a promised rebate of all the tax we’d paid, which would somehow radically alter our emissions-belching behaviour. Or pumping carbon deep underground in hopes it stays there. Or paying $13 billion in tax support for a foreign-owned car battery plant.

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This was a common-sense project the nation could get behind; the creation of a massive carbon sponge with the double bonus of growing it into eye-pleasing scenery and a habitat for animals as tree plantings turned into forests.

But according to the environment commissioner’s report released on Thursday, that green dream has foundered on this government’s go-slow-if-at-all approach to doing everything coupled with bureaucratic inertia and an intergovernmental lack of timely co-operation.

Four years after the idea first took root, the commissioner has identified a mind-reeling list of failures which makes it “unlikely that the program will meet its objectives."

For starters, only 1.5 per cent of the target has been reached after two years in operation. Of the 200 applications for tree plantings received to date, just 28 agreemeents have been signed to plant a severely modest 2.2 million trees.

In his most optimistic view, assuming all signed agreements are implemented, “the program would be projected to plant 76.2-million trees by the end of the program, or 3.8 per cent of the overall two-billion tree goal,” commissioner Jerry DeMarco wrote.

The odds of success are further bogged down by logistics that should’ve been thought out before the project was announced and now show little sign of being addressed.

The nurseries, which must grow a collective 350 million seedlings per year to meet the target, are understandably hesitant to plant without long-term assurances their product will have a buyer. So far, those assurances are not forthcoming - and neither are the saplings.

Most of the few signed partner agreements don’t have stipulations allowing the government to monitor if the planted trees are still standing after five years of growth.

What’s worse, the program allows industrial partners to claim carbon offsets for the trees they plant as a substitute for throttling back their smokestacks. In other words, it’s a zero net gain in emission reductions.

And while there has been some recent progress in signing provincial and territorial partners, which are responsible for planting 1.34 billion trees in the plan, that handful of agreements are short-term and plant a relatively small number of trees.

While this report reads like an advance obituary for the program, it’s not like there isn’t political commitment from on high.

I was reliably told of an incident last summer when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined a group of Liberal staffers and their friends on a patio in downtown Ottawa. Trudeau promptly killed the party mood by delivering a prolonged scientific dissertation on the impressive amount of carbon that could be stored in a single tree.

So he gets the concept, he’s boss of a government that planted the idea and clearly has the money to buy a massive cross-Canada planting project that would deliver far more bang for the carbon-reduction buck than those eye-watering subsidies for a car battery plant.

Yet his government, which is overdue for regime change into one that would be far less enthusiastic about continuing to nurture this Liberal project along, seems to be putting little effort into growing the idea.

Part of the blame is undoubtedly Trudeau’s overwhelmed office of control freaks, who refuse to delegate power and have thus turned a firehose of incoming decision-making into a trickle-hose of outflowing action.

But most of the slowdown seems to be inside a bureaucracy that is conducting excessive consultations on the project, including a gender analysis study, before putting shovels in the ground.

That’s creating a missed opportunity to lead Canadians and inspire individuals to participate in a project that would deliver substantial carbon reduction in the long term.

I digress, but there’s a conservation area near my Ontario hometown where I helped plant thousands of seedlings as a Cub scout a very long time ago. I often walk there now to marvel at the towering forest of pine and spruce that stand on that former field.

I suspect Canadians, particularly kids, would seize on tree-planting as a tangible way to help the environment - if only Trudeau’s government wasn’t taking a slow-motion chainsaw to the project before it takes root.

That’s the bottom line…