Ontario’s low-carbon transition: The role of a provincial cap-and-trade program

TL;DRAbstract

This major research paper addresses the question of how a sub-national entity such as Ontario can design an environmentally effective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading system in the context of policy gridlock in Canada and through the UNFCCC process. The paper begins by exploring the historical context of climate change policy at the international and national levels in order to demonstrate how we have arrived at the current situation of policy gridlock and illustrate the opportunity for sub-national entities such as Ontario to take a progressive approach to climate change mitigation. But as climate change policy develops in an asymmetrical fashion within Canada, North America and the globe, policymakers in Ontario need to carefully design the proposed emissions trading system to balance the need to maintain environmentally integrity of the system (i.e. make a contribution to the decarbonization of the provincial economy) without overly harming the economic competitiveness of the

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