According to data from the US Department of Energy, the world average per capita greenhouse gas emission was 4.24 metric tons CO2 equivalent per year in 2004. The matching figure for Canada was 20.
Of course, most Canadians must live in a climate that does not offer any possibility of living without effective shelter from cold as people can in many tropical countries. Our living standard must match that of the USA or all our able people would head south. Our long shipping distances add to emissions as well. However, there is more to it than that.
In the 1970's I was working on some energy matters at the National Research Council of Canada. We had a newly created energy division to coordinate and focus work that was spread across 3 divisions. The opposition that NRC encountered for this work was fierce. Alberta led the charge, demanding that we stop work that would reduce the market for Alberta oil and gas and thus keep Albertans subservient to the east. The opposition of the province of Quebec, through Quebec Hydro who wanted to expand their nuclear power, was very strong as well. The end result was that NRC eventually felt impelled to close the energy division.
In my own division, I was working on radiation control using atomic-thickness thin films on windows to quadruple their insulation value without impacting solar heat gain. (You want solar heat gain for Canadian single-family residences, you need to stop it for almost all commercial buildings.) The Bank of Canada wanted us to work instead on anti-counterfeiting measures, and offered effective financing for such work; the federal police force (RCMP) offered enthusiastic support for that as well.
Even the RCMP considered that counterfeiting only cost Canada some $20 million a year at that time. If the windows I designed were to be used in all new residential construction, the net savings to Canada as a whole would have been $300 million per year after ten years due to reduction in heating costs of new conventionally constructed homes.
To show the potential of these windows in moving beyond conventional construction, I had modified my farm home to use windows to achieve 15% totally passive solar heating even though I was limited to plain triple-glazing. The new windows would have doubled that. The design was considered the best of its type in Canada by a major report at that time.
My director, faced with the decision between what was much the best for NRC and what was best for the country, had really only one possible choice: NRC. We developed the maple leafs that Canadian bills used until recently. You still can't buy windows even half as good as we could have had.
The same fate befell my work on reducing the heat wasted by long runs of pipe between domestic central hot water tanks and remote bathrooms, and on improving the then-abysmal efficiency of domestic refrigerators, as well as able and potentially effective contributions by many others at NRC.
Those who sell and control energy have had far too much power in Canada for meaningful energy reduction here to have had a chance. We need to change that before the average person can make more than a token contribution to greenhouse gas reduction.
See also:
The Kyoto Protocol vs. Canada
Taking the Temperature of the Earth