Spending to Fail
The true cost of Canadian emissions reduction investments
In an otherwise unremarkable recent article, the Wall Street Journal dropped an interesting claim, stating that Canada is currently “the only G-7 country with higher emissions than in 1990.” According to Our World in Data, that’s technically correct:
Diving just a bit deeper into the data however shows us there are also six wealthy non G-7 nations with increasing emissions: Australia, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, and Spain. Nevertheless, depending on how you define “developed”, there were at least 14 rich countries that brought their emissions down.
All of which is particularly interesting considering how Justin Trudeau’s cornerstone promise from his very first federal campaign in 2015 was to reduce carbon emissions. By contrast, the European Union’s emissions fell by 29% in the years since 1990 and the US got theirs down by 1.2%. But nine years into Trudeau’s rule, and Canada’s getting worse.
How much did this embarrassing failure cost Canadians? I honestly don’t know. Between the mandated all-of-government integration aimed at reducing emissions, artificially boosted energy consumption prices, opportunity costs associated with crippling the oil and gas industry, and the usual government waste, the real total has got to be heavy. But I couldn’t easily give it a precise figure.
So we’ll have to make do with a proxy to serve as an helpful example. And that proxy will be BGIS.
BGIS? Oh, I mean Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions Inc. Still drawing a blank? How about Brascan - the name they used between 1969 and 2005. Or I guess you could go with their parent company, Brookfield Corporation, which is one of Canada’s largest companies by market capitalization. They’re worth north of $60 billion at last count.
Whatever you want to call them, BGIS is a large player in the facility management market. Back in 2018 they claimed to be responsible for 220 million sq.ft. of property across 15,000 North American locations and to be managing $3.4 billion in client spending. Based on the Canadian government contracts I’ve seen reported, I think they’re being modest.
Between 2015 and 2024, BGIS (or, as they’re sometimes referenced, “Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions”) won federal contracts worth more than $34.1 billion. Around 12% of those contracts were classified as non-competitive solicitations.
The contracts are categorized using around 30 unique descriptions that cover just about everything the word “infrastructure” conjures. Those include:
Office buildings
Institutional Buildings
Processing machinery
Waterworks and sewage systems
Electric lighting, distribution and control equipment
Computer equipment related to distributed computing environment
License/Maintenance fees for networking software
There’s no way I’m aware of to know whether any of those involve ground-up construction or just management and renovations of existing buildings. But we’re definitely not talking about updating your patio stones.
Great. But what’s all that have to do with Canada’s emission reduction failures? Well we are talking about federal government contracts here, right? Here’s what Public Services and Procurement Canada says about new contracts:
As of 2022, 46% of all PSPC-administered standing offers and supply arrangements include environmental considerations. To help accelerate a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and circular economy, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and PSPC work with industry to develop environmental considerations that must be included in all procurement instruments.
And here’s part of how BGIS describes what they do:
BGIS assists clients in meeting sustainability commitments with a focus on aggressively reducing GHG emissions and potable water consumption, reducing energy use, as well as implementing strategies to achieve zero waste.
It’s therefore safe to assume that a significant proportion of the $34.1 billion we paid BGIS was “aggressively” directed to renovations designed to reduce CO2 emissions. Which would be just fine if all that spending moved the needle on our real-world emissions.
But it didn’t.
It seems we’ve got absolutely nothing to show for all that spending.
And of course you won’t forget to check out my new The Audit book, will you:
The net zero delusion must be sold as snake oil as the reality and cost of abandoning higher density energy for lower density energy is a loss of prosperity and de-industrialization. Canada is a cold nation, widely dispersed, and heavily reliant on hydrocarbons for heat and transportation and inflicted with immigration policies that give it a spectacular housing shortage as well as increasing hydrocarbon usage. With no grid capacity to further electrify and nuclear power as the only practical high density non emitting source for such of course our CO2 emissions will rise.
What that graph really shows is the futility of Canada trying to drop CO2 emissions at all. Because our emissions are so insignificant. It would be interesting to see China and India on that graph too. All those US reductions (well most) came from switching from coal to natural gas. Then you would really see the elephants in the room.