Those demanded that Canada's emissions fall 6 per cent below 1990 levels beginning in 2012. The new goal meant they would still be 2.5 per cent higher than 1990 levels by as late as 2020.

Shortly afterward the government quietly deleted the "Regulatory Framework," a program Harper had once said, "positions Canada as a leader in fighting climate change," from its fourth global warming plan.

The feds cited "a decision to align Government of Canada actions to address climate change with those of the United States." But within months those actions would too be abandoned.

That July, the U.S. Senate's push for cap and trade collapsed in the face of partisan opposition. A surge of Republican victories in November's mid-term elections ensured it wouldn't soon be resurrected. Two days later, Prentice resigned from politics.

His replacement, Environment Minister Peter Kent, told reporters that any plans for cap-and-trade in Canada were "off the table."

Absent the scuttled "Regulatory Framework" however, little appeared to be left on the table. Surviving climate programs -- for instance, new efficiency standards for cars and light trucks -- were expected to slash only 27 megatons of carbon by 2012.

That was only one-tenth of the cuts that had been promised five years before.

By late 2011 Vaughan determined that Canada's original Kyoto target would not be met under any scenario. He was doubtful Canada even had a fighting chance of achieving its more lenient Copenhagen goals.

"The (Regulatory Framework) was the heart of the government's greenhouse gas emissions program," Vaughan told Tyee Solutions. "If you cut out the heart of your program, you shouldn't be surprised that the results are mediocre."

Still too little traction

Few observers of Canada's climate progress were shocked, then, when Kent announced his government's decision to pull out of Kyoto last December. (Canada was so far behind its targets that it would have needed to buy $14 billion worth of carbon offsets to comply). Yet the international response was furious.

France's foreign ministry called the withdrawal "bad news for the fight against climate change." The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu deemed it "an act of sabotage on our future."

Unrepentant, Kent predicted that other countries would soon follow Canada to the exit. "It's really only the Europeans who are staying with Kyoto," he said.

Though Japan and Russia were also set to miss their Kyoto targets, the Harper government's defiant withdrawal from the convention played into impressions that Canada, influenced by its bitumen industry, was holding back global climate progress.

The policy decision became a major international news story, with many observers reaching the same conclusion as BBC correspondent Richard Black. "In broad terms," Black wrote, "extensive tar sands development would not be compatible with continued adherence to the Kyoto Protocol."

In more than six months since setting off that outcry, the federal government has done little to douse it. Its current climate plan is to develop individual performance standards for each of Canada's industrial sectors.

Performance standards compelling emissions reductions in coal and electricity production are largely complete but still years away from implementation. Regulations for oil and gas operations will be unveiled in 2013.

The initiatives, Environment Canada spokesperson Céline Tremblay wrote in an email, will achieve "real environmental and economic benefits for all Canadians." But she acknowledged the criticism that every existing provincial and federal climate program combined will only get Canada one quarter of the way to its Copenhagen climate commitments.

With eight years left, as Vaughan argued in May's report, "it is unlikely that enough time is left ... to meet the 2020 target."

Follow Alberta?

Should Stephen Harper wish to prove Vaughan wrong -- or perhaps now "to do whatever we can to address this world problem," as he once promised of climate change -- his government could do worse than to follow Alberta's lead.

In 2007, the province implemented something much like what Harper had proposed the same year. Major industrial operations in Alberta had to reduce their carbon intensity by 12 per cent, and pay $15 for each ton of carbon that exceeded that target.

The approach revealed serious flaws, including a carbon price so low it may actually be impeding the low-carbon transition it purports to encourage. Yet after five years' experience with Alberta's system, many oil sands firms warmly support placing a market value on their greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the biggest oil sands players, Suncor, has even advocated for the Alberta price to be extended when it comes up for review in 2014. "Having a policy regime in place that creates a clear sense of the rules of the game and really allows us to plan longer term is very important," the company's vice-president of sustainable development, Gordon Lambert, told Tyee Solutions.

"If you're going to regulate carbon," agreed Jon Mitchell, Cenovus team leader for environment policy and strategy, "it should be done through economic measures, rather than regulation."

Mitchell, and much of the oil sands industry, would prefer the economic flexibility of a carbon price to the command-and-control standards now being developed in Ottawa.

The Canada West Foundation, a moderate pro-business think-tank, reached the same conclusion after hosting a series of workshops in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver last year.

"There is no question," a summary report read, "that Western Canada can prosper in a low-carbon future."

Alberta's carbon price will reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions at most by five megatons by 2020, the Pembina Institute estimates. That's a piddling amount for a province whose oil sands industry alone is expected to release 92 megatons of carbon in that year.

Taking Alberta's $15-per-tonne carbon price national, as Harper first proposed in 2007, could multiply its impact dramatically, slashing as much as 164.4 megatons from Canada's carbon footprint, and bringing the country within 13.6 megatons of meeting its 2020 Copenhagen target; a target it's now set to miss by 178 megatons.

Cheap in the long run

Extending Alberta-style carbon pricing to the rest of the country need not be expensive. Workups for the ill-fated 2007 "Framework" estimated that its economic impacts would be less than 0.5 per cent of Canada's annual GDP.

"Elements of our plan," Harper said in 2007, "could work not just for Canada, but for many countries in the world." Yet by earlier this year, his Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird claimed that an economy-wide price on carbon "would kill and hurt Canadian families."

Baird's view was strikingly at odds with his party's own natural constituency among business. And even with previous statements by Prime Minister Harper.

If attendees at the Canada West Foundation's workshops are to be believed, a who's who of Canadian capitalism that includes the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Rio Tinto Alcan Ltd., Shell Canada and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, alongside clean energy startups, crown corporations, provincial bureaucrats and academics, is eager to adopt Baird's "family-killing" carbon price. The sooner, they say, the better.

From Canada West's Calgary offices, report author Shawna Stirrett told Tyee Solutions that the consensus the roundtables revealed didn't surprise her. "The reality is that industry does support carbon pricing," she said. Roundtable participants apparently agreed on something else as well: "The missing component everyone identified, was the political will to make it happen," Stirrett added.

This is the last article in an eight-part series "Greening the Oil Sands: Can Canada Make the Transition?" Find the entire series collected under a single URL (feel free to tweet, email and Facebook!) here.