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Ten months before he resigned from Mark Carney’s cabinet, Steven Guilbeault vouched for the then Liberal leadership contender.
“I’ve known Mark for many years. We’ve worked together on issues of green energy, transition, fighting climate change and the role of the financial sector in fighting climate change,” Guilbeault told reporters when he endorsed Carney’s candidacy to lead the party in January.
If Carney was known for anything other than being a central banker it was for his advocacy on climate change, going back at least a decade to a celebrated speech he delivered as governor of the Bank of England. He was the UN’s special envoy for climate action and finance and co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (which unravelled just as Carney was preparing to seek the Liberal leadership).
But when Guilbeault announced his resignation, the former environment minister could list a number of climate policies that Carney’s government had either abandoned, delayed or weakened.
Did Guilbeault misjudge Carney?
“No, I don’t think I did,” Guilbeault said in an interview on CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live this past weekend. “I’ve come to the conclusion that him and I have a different view of how we should go about fighting climate change.”
Chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton speaks with Quebec Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, who resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet last week, about his party’s deal with Alberta for a potential pipeline to the west coast of B.C., and why he thinks the federal government is stoking Quebec separatism by walking back its climate commitments.
Carney, Guilbeault suggested, takes the view that fighting climate change is largely going to be driven by markets and is averse to strict regulations. Such a distinction might explain why Carney’s government is putting its emphasis on industrial carbon-pricing.
It seems implausible that Carney was merely feigning interest in climate change up till now — it is, for instance, a major theme of Value(s), his 2022 book on economic theory and practice.
“Climate change is the ultimate betrayal of intergenerational equity,” he wrote.
But if Carney’s first nine months as prime minister have revealed a difference of opinion over how the federal government should go about fighting climate change — as to opposed to whether the federal government should do much to fight climate change — he now has to prove that his approach can put Canada on a credible path to net-zero emissions by 2050.
“I think there’s not enough time anymore to get new policies in place to deliver on [Canada’s] 2030 target, given the policies moved away from,” says Dale Beugin, executive vice-president at the Canadian Climate Institute. “But I think that there is still time to get the long-term signals in place and that 2050 net-zero is still possible.”
What will Carney’s climate agenda look like?
The industrial carbon-pricing systems adopted by provinces over the last decade have suffered from both design issues and political opposition. And the best climate argument for Carney’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith might be that it promises to deal with both problems — strengthening the policy and winning Alberta’s support for it.
But if Alberta strengthens its industrial carbon price, the federal clean electricity regulations would be suspended in the province. And the Climate Institute has fairly worried that granting such an exemption could undermine climate policy nationwide — effectively inviting provinces to petition for their own carve-outs.
To counter that risk, Beugin suggests that the Carney government should pursue an equivalency agreement with Alberta — a legal tool that federal and provincial governments can negotiate where there are disputes over different regulations.
“Real equivalency agreements have to show their math,” Beugin says. “They have to demonstrate that those lost emissions reductions from one policy are being recovered by another.”
Chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton speaks with Minister of Environment and Climate Change Julie Dabrusin about the environmental implications of the Alberta-Canada energy agreement. Plus, Brian Jean, Alberta’s energy minister, talks about what benefits a new pipeline would bring to the province. And B.C. Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix explains why a bitumen pipeline is a non-starter for the west coast.
Beugin says policy wonks both outside and inside government need to do some thinking about what Canada’s climate policy agenda might look like going forward, but that the emphasis should continue to be electrification and clean electricity — which the memorandum touches on when it mentions the construction of new interties between Alberta and British Columbia.
“The safe bets and wild cards that we’ve been talking about for years are still there and are still true, and it’s still very clear that clean electricity and electrification are the biggest safe bets on the way to net zero,” Beugin says.
Beyond the MOU, there are other lingering questions about the federal government’s climate agenda.
The zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which was to take effect next year, was suspended in September and a 60-day review of the policy was launched. The results of that review have not yet been announced and the promised return of a consumer rebate for ZEV purchases hasn’t yet materialized.
Two broader retrofit programs — the Greener Homes Loan and Greener Homes Grant — are being wound down this fall. A new home retrofit program, aimed at low- to median-income homeowners, was launched in September, but is so far only available in Manitoba.
The sudden departures of two members of the federal government’s Net-Zero Advisory Body — a committee of outside experts established under climate accountability legislation by the Trudeau government — also raise questions about the Carney government’s commitment to the governance infrastructure that was supposed to help guide federal climate policy over the next 25 years.
The politics of climate change
Whatever the philosophical differences that might be guiding some of Carney’s moves on climate policy, it’s not hard to understand why he and his advisers might also think they have room politically to de-emphasize or soften climate policy. The Canadian public, like the Carney government, seems more concerned with other things right now.
Recent polling by Abacus Data found that only 13 per cent of voters ranked climate change as one of their top three issues, well back of concerns like the cost of living (64 per cent) and Donald Trump (34 per cent). Among Liberal voters, the share only rises to 16 per cent. As has been the case for years, the long-term threat of climate change tends to take a backseat when more immediate threats present themselves.
So long as Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives remain absent on the issue — opposed to virtually every major policy aimed at reducing Canada’s domestic emissions — Carney will be able to argue his approach is superior to the most likely alternative. But at some point the Liberals presumably risk losing voters to other options, like the NDP.
When Abacus surveyed Canadians about the MOU, it asked respondents to choose from two possible framings of the agreement — that it was a worthwhile compromise between economic and environmental policies or that it was a betrayal of recent climate progress and Carney’s own stated beliefs. A majority chose the former, which is a victory for the prime minister. But 24 per cent chose the latter — including 22 per cent of Liberal voters.
That 22 per cent isn’t nothing, particularly when federal elections are now often determined by relatively narrow margins.
And while Guilbeault’s departure from cabinet might not doom the Carney government, it does mean the Liberal Party’s climate caucus has gained a credible figure who might now feel more free to speak publicly about what more the federal government should be doing to combat climate change.
