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| EST. READ TIME 2 MIN.Air Pollution Policy in Canada: Improving on Success
This paper describes the evolution of Canadian air quality since the early 1970s and discusses the scientific question of whether current air pollution levels are a threat to human health. It then describes the existing structure of Canadian air-pollution policy, including the new focus on ultrafine particles and the introduction of Air Quality Indexes. It concludes by outlining some general principles that should guide policy-makers for developing future air-pollution legislation.
Air quality in Canada has substantially improved since the 1970s and at least some of this improvement can be attributed to the detailed, extensive system of legislation currently in place to control air pollution. New initiatives in air pollution legislation, including the proposed Clean Air Act , should take into account the fact that air quality is already regulated and that pollution has already been substantially reduced. This paper describes the evolution of Canadian air quality since the early 1970s and discusses the scientific question of whether current air pollution levels are a threat to human health. It then describes the existing structure of Canadian air-pollution policy, including the new focus on ultrafine particles and the introduction of Air Quality Indexes. It concludes by outlining some general principles that should guide policy-makers for developing future air-pollution legislation. It argues that policy-makers should begin by focusing on giving people access to objective, accurate, and up-to-date information on pollution levels and trends, as well as helping them to understand the existing structure of air-pollution regulations that affect their regions. It also argues for flexible, locally-tailored initiatives that give people more direct say in the level of environmental quality they enjoy, and for more exploration of the use of emission-pricing instruments.
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Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. Heis the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).… Read more