This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Heather Exner-Pirot, February 11, 2025
Last week Liberal leadership hopeful Mark Carney released his first policy platform, focusing on climate. The plan would seem reasonable, even mundane, except for one thing: it was proposed in January 2025, not September 2021. The world is a vastly different place since the last time Canada had a federal election. Carney seems not to have noticed.
The COVID pandemic, inflation, the housing crisis: these have pushed Canadians to prioritize things at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Carney has made climate policy the centrepiece of his leadership campaign, but as an issue that voters care about, it has been experiencing free fall.
Polling by Abacus in September showed public concern about climate change has dropped by 14 points in the past year. In their survey in January, climate fell behind the cost of living, health care, housing, economy, immigration, and Donald Trump on a list of top issues facing Canada.
That economic angst has now collided with the threat of 25 percent tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump. This has caused the zeitgeist to shift. What seemed for years to be fiercely held views on climate and energy are now evolving from day to day.
B.C. Premier David Eby just recently promised to fast-track energy projects, saying “If you’re not buying oil and gas from British Columbia and Canada, you’re buying it from Venezuela.”
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has asserted that “[we] can’t expect Nova Scotia to prosper when we ban industry after industry after industry…Special interests have captured too many parts of our economy and have had an outsized voice in policy creation.”
Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette has declared that his province is open to reconsidering two major energy infrastructure projects that were previously rejected, Energy East and GNL Quebec in the Saguenay region, saying “If we address these concerns today, these are projects that could be accepted.”
There are umpteen examples of how the country’s perception of our oil and gas has shifted in the past month. Average Canadians now know how many barrels we export to the U.S., the dependence of Midwest refineries on Canadian oil, and the difference between heavy and light crude oil. That used to be inside baseball in downtown Calgary; it’s now water cooler conversation in Winnipeg.
Yet you’d never know it from Carney’s climate plan, which is written for a time that no longer exists. And of all the people who should be aware that the mood had shifted, Carney is top of the list. That’s because his own signature achievement, the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), has just succumbed to it.
Carney launched GFANZ in April 2021 at COP26, the annual global climate meeting, in his capacity as UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. One pillar of it was a Net Zero Banking Alliance, which aimed to use the lending power of the world’s largest banks to finance the transition to net zero emissions by 2050.
Yet in the weeks following the U.S. presidential election, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock all announced their withdrawal. Canadian banks joined the exodus in January, with RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, CIBC, and National Bank pulling out.
The alliance was a victim of political pressure, from Republicans in the U.S. abhorrent of its perceived wokeness, but also financial pressure. Oil, gas, and coal have frequently outperformed the market since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. ESG was an easier sell when oil was $60 a barrel.
No matter. Carney intends to reduce emissions, drive investment, and build an economy for the future. He has proposed a classically Liberal 16-point plan that adds new regulations, policies, subsidies, mandates, incentives, taxonomies, and guidelines. Without any sense of irony, it is branded as an “industrial competitiveness strategy.”
Other than the about-face on the consumer tax—a political inevitability—there is nothing to distinguish what Carney is proposing from what could’ve been in the 2021 Liberal platform.
The policy most ridiculed—moving from the consumer carbon tax to a more robust Output-Based Pricing System for large, industrial emitters—is the one I most agree with. It would not, in fact, be a switch; Canada currently has both consumer and industrial carbon pricing, and most provinces developed their own version of the latter (my province of Alberta was the first, initiating its own industrial carbon pricing system in 2007). By and large, it works. If Carney is proposing better-functioning carbon markets in Canada, and not an increase in the price for a tonne of carbon that makes our heavy emitting sectors globally uncompetitive, that would be welcome.
The other policies are less inspiring. They include a combination of environmental movement favourites, such as EV and heat pump subsidies; climate banker favourites, such as sustainable investment guidelines, taxonomies, and climate risk disclosures; and oil and gas bashing favourites, such as eliminating fossil fuels from all federal buildings by 2030 (an impossible and virtue signalling endeavour) and strengthening oil and gas methane regulations (ours are already the strongest).
Here I save my harshest criticism for last. I don’t expect anything Carney is proposing will have any meaningful impact on reducing global emissions. I don’t mean that in a “Canadian emissions don’t matter” sense. I mean that the policies are small, and they fiddle around the edges. Maybe ten years ago we could have lulled ourselves into thinking that heat pump and EV charger subsidies meant anything, but now we all know better.
The failures of the past decade of climate policy have been laid bare for all to see. It has largely been an elitist project, imposing high costs on our economy, our competitiveness, and our security, but with precious few emissions reductions in return. Now it faces a revolt in North America and Europe.
There is a dire need for climate policies that understand that most Canadians want to lower emissions, but will always prioritize energy affordability and security; that take stock of what has actually worked (coal to gas switching, nuclear energy, electrification, methane capture) and what has been performative nonsense; that doesn’t just say the energy transition can lead to a strong economy, but can actually demonstrate that.
Carney’s climate policy is not aware of greenlash, of the productivity crisis, of Trump tariff threats, or a lack of pipelines. Canadians are—acutely.
