Detailed new analysis reveals progress and challenges in federal and provincial GHG emissions reduction: 2005-2022.
Canada has a mixed record when it comes to climate policy and emissions progress. While the country has made progress reducing emissions nationally in recent years, the story at a regional and sectoral level has been about variation. Big emissions cuts in some provinces and sectors have been counteracted by increases in others.
The yardstick for Canada’s emissions targets is progress from 2005. So what’s been happening since that year? For the past 20 years, federal, provincial, and territorial governments have rolled out numerous policies aimed at curbing emissions—particularly in electricity, buildings, and heavy industry—while energy efficiency has quietly delivered steady gains across the economy.
At the same time, global technology shifts have begun to reshape the landscape. Cleaner and more efficient technologies are becoming more widespread, with their penetration starting to make a real dent in energy use and emissions. But elsewhere—including stubbornly high emissions from oil and gas—progress has been slow and uneven.
Working with the Net-Zero Advisory Body, we looked back on Canada’s emissions trends from 2005 to 2022 to better understand what’s been driving change across the country. For each province and the combined territories, we used a Kaya identity decomposition method to attribute the change in emissions over time to three drivers: changes in economic activity, energy intensity, and carbon intensity.
In this Insight we explain some of our key findings: what progress has been made, what explains it, and where emissions have continued to rise. How have federal and provincial governments worked together or in parallel to shape outcomes? And what role have market forces and technology played? By digging into the data, we surface lessons that can inform the next phase of Canada’s climate policy.
Emissions in most provinces fell, but progress was uneven across a diverse federation
As a whole, national greenhouse gas emissions fell 8 per cent between 2005 and 2022. But beneath the national numbers lies a diverse set of trends among the provinces and territories. Emissions rose in Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia, with the biggest emissions growth primarily driven by oil and gas in Alberta. In all the other provinces and territories, emissions fell. (See Figure 1). Ontario’s emissions reductions were the largest, cutting 46 megatonnes (Mt) over the time period.
Figure 1: Most provinces and territories cut emissions since 2005
These emissions trajectories were shaped by climate policy, as well as the structure of their economies and their starting points for clean and fossil-based energy.
In Canada, responsibility for climate policy—and credit for its successes—is shared across all orders of government. Federal, provincial, and territorial governments introduced a range of climate policies over this time period that, together, helped flatten the emissions curve, particularly from electricity generation and buildings. Joint responsibility sometimes led to effective cooperation, and sometimes to disagreement or divergence.
But policy hasn’t worked in isolation. Shifting market dynamics have also delivered more efficient and lower-emitting technologies that have reduced emissions. Steadily improving energy efficiency across the economy and better methane management in conventional oil and gas have offset some emissions growth. Importantly, all of this has happened in the context of strong population and economic growth, which can exert upward pressure on emissions.
Progress has been uneven, with countervailing forces working against emissions reductions. For example, rising emissions from oil sands production have more or less offset gains elsewhere. Transport emissions are now at 2005 levels, as the emission-reduction power of better vehicle fuel efficiency and fuel decarbonization butted up against a range of factors, including a shift to larger vehicles, population growth, and longer distances travelled.
Action from the provinces and the federal government helped drive down emissions
What helps explain these emissions trends? When it comes to climate policy progress, it has often been the provinces that have moved first. Chief among these were efforts from Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick to phase out coal-fired power and add renewables. In the provincial decomposition results provided in Figure 2, the impact of the decline in coal use shows up in declining carbon intensity within the electricity sector in these four provinces. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia brought in methane regulations for the oil and gas sector, while several provinces promoted cleaner transportation fuels, including B.C. and Manitoba. Provinces also took the lead in creating carbon pricing systems. Carbon pricing systems in British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta put downward pressure on emissions.
In many cases, federal policy later reinforced or extended these provincial efforts. National carbon pricing, the coal-fired electricity phase-out, and incentive programs for clean technology all helped backstop provincial action and fill gaps. While the policy mix still differs across provinces, overall alignment between orders of government has produced measurable progress in electricity, methane, and building heat.
For some other cases, our analysis shows signs that policies have had an effect, even if it has not always been sufficient to counterbalance more powerful drivers that have pushed emission upwards. For example, even as oil and gas emissions rose, regulations for methane released by oil and gas operations have been effective. While economic growth in highly emissions-intensive parts of the oil and gas sector in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan pushed up emissions, reduced methane venting had an appreciable dampening effect on emissions growth, as the regulations intended.
Energy efficiency has also played a quiet but important role in Canada’s emissions story. Improvements in industry reduced the amount of energy needed per dollar of GDP. In buildings and transportation, policies such as building codes and efficiency standards for vehicles and appliances helped drive efficiency gains. Less energy was required to heat each square foot of building space, and less energy was used per kilometre travelled.
Electricity is where federal-provincial policy alignment delivered the biggest emissions wins
Electricity has been Canada’s biggest emissions success story, with emissions falling nearly 60 per cent below 2005 levels, even as electricity generation increased to meet climbing demand.
Back in 2005, Ontario, Alberta, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia burned significant amounts of coal and oil to make electricity. By 2022, each of these provinces had switched to using more gas and more renewable energy. That shift drove the most significant emission reductions in Canada. Getting off coal in Ontario was the most important driver of emission reductions over the past 20 years because the province is Canada’s biggest economy and home to the largest population. That change led to 29 megatonnes of emissions reductions, and in total, Ontario’s emissions fell 46 Mt—the biggest drop in Canada.
The electricity sector’s progress reflects a combination of provincial leadership, national standards, and targeted federal investment, all reinforced by the rapidly falling cost of renewable technologies. Ontario and Alberta led the way with coal phase-outs, later backed by a federal phase-out. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick adopted renewable targets that gained momentum as wind and solar costs fell. Federal programs supported grid upgrades and interties, while carbon pricing added incentives to accelerate the shift to lower-emitting power. The confluence of policy and wider market forces showed up in our identity decomposition results as a steep decline in carbon intensity of electricity across all coal-burning provinces.
Cleaner electricity also unlocked emission reductions in other sectors. For example, alongside efforts to use less coal in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Maritimers also used less oil and more electricity to heat buildings, pushing emissions further down as that electricity got cleaner. In the identity decomposition for the Maritime provinces, the effect of this shift is visible in the declines in carbon intensity within the building sector.
That amplifying effect across sectors means that access to clean electricity can enable more economic growth with less upward pressure on emissions. In Quebec’s building sector, for example, total floor space increased alongside population growth. But emissions from buildings still fell due to the combined effect of energy efficiency improvements and greater use of clean electricity for building heat.
Market forces caused emissions decline in some places, and increases elsewhere
Over this time period, technological change also made some cleaner, more efficient options more affordable and available. Consumers and businesses responded to rising energy prices by adopting more efficient technologies, notably heat pumps and LED lighting. Falling costs for renewables and higher fossil fuel prices nudged the market toward lower-emitting options in the electricity sector. These market signals, though, were not independent of government climate action, as policies like efficiency regulations, carbon pricing, and consumer incentives can also accelerate uptake and technological change.
Broader economic changes driven by larger market forces led to growth and decline across different industries and affected emission trends. For example in the Atlantic provinces and the territories, the years between 2005 and 2022 saw the closure of industrial facilities, including the Dartmouth oil refinery and offshore gas production in Nova Scotia. In the identity decomposition results for New Brunswick in Figure 2, we see that declining activity in oil and gas and mining resulted in net emission reductions from that sector, even as energy intensity and carbon intensity increased.
In Alberta, shifts in the economy pushed in the opposite direction, stymieing climate progress. Alberta’s oil and gas industry—the province’s largest sector and bigger emitter—shifted to include relatively more oil sands operations and less conventional oil and gas. In the identity decomposition results for Alberta in Figure 2, most of the upward pressure on emissions is from the combined effect of increased activity in oil and gas overall, and the movement towards more energy-intensive types of extraction. This trend is particularly important for the country, since emissions from the Alberta oil and gas sector make up a fifth of Canada’s total national emissions and climate policy to date has been insufficient to constrain their continued rise.
Looking ahead: building on what worked and filling gaps
Climate policy in the last 20 years has had some real wins. Decarbonizing electricity is the biggest success story to date, with strong policy action supported by market trends, such as low and declining costs for renewables and storage. This is the trend to build on: coordinated policy across the federation, reinforced by falling clean technology costs, driving emissions down. Even within provinces where emissions have been climbing overall, we can see places where policy and market drivers have put downward pressure on emissions, though insufficiently.
Pockets of progress have delivered meaningful emission reductions, but there is much more to do. The path forward includes extending the model that has worked for clean electricity—minimum national standards with provincial flexibility—to other high-priority areas. This approach protects ambition and competitiveness while allowing provinces and territories to pursue strategies suited to their circumstances. Applying it to high priority policies—notably methane regulations, industrial carbon pricing, and zero-emission transportation—can accelerate progress, avoid policy gaps, and support a cleaner, more competitive economy in an increasingly uncertain global context.
Figure 2: What’s driving emission trends is unique in each province and territory
Sachi Gibson is a Research Director at the Canadian Climate Institute. Dave Sawyer is Principal Economist at the Canadian Climate Institute. Bradford Griffin is a 440 Megatonnes Advisor and the Executive Director of Simon Fraser University’s Canadian Energy and Emissions Data Centre. Alison Bailie is a Senior Research Associate at the Canadian Climate Institute.