STIRLING: Trudeau's housing plan cancels out your carbon tax sacrifice

Mark Carney has been touting the “Blueprint” for building 5.8 million homes by 2030 in both mainstream and social media.So much of the “Blueprint” is echoed in the recently released federal “Canada’s Housing Plan” to build 3.9 million homes by 2031, as reported by Reuters on April 12 2024, that it clearly was the template. A big difference however, is that the Carney-et-al version was littered with the words ‘climate change’ 36 times and ‘homelessness’ once. By contrast the federal version mentions ‘homelessness’ 32 times and ‘climate change’ once.There’s no doubt that Canada faces a housing crisis; the question is, how did this become our problem to solve? And does the “Blueprint” or “Canada’s Housing Plan” solve anything…let alone an alleged climate crisis?The main reason for the shortage in housing is two-fold. One is the Century Initiative, which was thought up by a group of Utopians like McKinsey’s Dominic Barton. It is in operation now and plans to bring ~63 million people to Canada in order to up our population to 100 million by 2100. The other is the unregulated influx of foreign students and temporary workers.It’s ironic that the same government that is obsessed with climate change and carbon taxes cannot see that people who come here from warmer places not only bring their own personal carbon footprint with them, but they also increase their carbon footprint to the Canadian average. Immigrants typically come from countries with a carbon footprint per person ranging from between 0.2 to 12 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year (tCO2-eq/yr). The average annual emissions per person of Canada's 2022 immigrants was 4.7 tCO2-eq based on the top 10 countries.By contrast, Canada's greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2021 were 17.5 tCO2-eq. The annual increase of emissions of the 2022 immigrants would have increased by 5.5 to 17.3 tCO2-eq per capita as they adopt Canada's cold climate and lifestyles.Last year, “Over 437,000 new permanent residents, along with over 604,000 temporary workers, were admitted.” No wonder the government doesn’t measure emissions reductions related to the carbon tax. There aren’t any. So, Canada’s immigration policy is not only creating chaos and homelessness in cities, but also increasing our national and global carbon footprint, rendering your carbon tax sacrifice entirely useless.In fact, adding 63 million people to Canada, based on a per capita emissions rate of 17.5 tCO2-eq would equate to Canada increasing its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 billion tCO2-eq.Both “Canada’s Housing Plan” and the Carney et al “Blueprint” propose that Canadian cities sweep away zoning regulations, conditional in return for infrastructure funding from the federal government.This underlies the current furor at Calgary City Hall where Mayor Gondek has signed on for Housing Accelerator Funding, which comes with the obligation to remove zoning regulations and green light random infill activity.Canada’s Housing Plan is to build 3.9 million homes in seven years when Canada, on average, builds 250,000 homes per year. One prefab home manufacturer wants the government to prefund and preapprove large scale housing projects to help them scale up. That means you will be paying for houses for millions of total strangers.Imagine your tax dollars underwriting the construction of the greater part of 3.9 million by 2031!Like the Carney et al “Blueprint,” “Canada’s Housing Plan” claims all these new homes will be “climate resilient” and lower emitters in the construction and over the long-term. This refers to the ‘embodied’ emissions of a home, as every activity to reduce emissions, entails…emissions.Therein lies the rub. The plan is issued by Infrastructure Canada, which requires all infrastructure funding applicants to use the “Climate Lens” – which is based on the implausible scenario known as Representative Concentration Pathway RCP 8.5.Even if embodied emissions are cut in half, such as in the COP26 test home the carbon footprint of a 3.9 million home build out would be huge. The COP26 test home folks say they could drop the normal 78 tonnes of CO2 embodied emissions (the emissions which are part and parcel of the construction materials and process), down to 32 tonnes using smart design strategies. That’s still 32 tCO2 x 3.9 million homes =124,800,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions. This doesn’t include infrastructure!As well as reduced quality of life for its existing residents, densification in cities requires upgrades (with huge, embedded emissions) to the regional electrical transmission and distribution grid, as well as existing subsurface infrastructure such as sewage, water supply and natural gas, as pointed out by Blair King on X/Twitter.While you are being financially impoverished by a carbon tax that imposes an overall deadweight loss on the economy, federal policies on housing and immigration are working at cross-purposes.NetZero was unattainable without these complications. With them, the concept of ‘stopping climate change’ with carbon tax policies is simply a catastrophic joke.