On Carney's agenda, climate is nowhere and everywhere

National Observer

4 days ago

Throughout Mark Carney's whirlwind first months on the job, two words have remained conspicuously absent from the prime minister's messaging: 'climate change.'
That's been a major disappointment for many in the climate community, who expected a more vocal advocacy from the former UN special envoy on climate action and finance. 'The G7 Leaders' Summit was a test of Canada's climate leadership, and Prime Minister Carney failed,' wrote Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, in an emblematic statement following the Kananaskis summit. Brouillete was responding to the G7's avoidance of climate change, including in a joint communique on the rising danger of wildfires.
'It's a serious omission, and that's being very polite,' wildfire expert Mike Flannigan told Canada's National Observer at the time.
So what happened? Where's the guy who dedicated two entire chapters of his book, Values, to the climate crisis? Why is the same person who used his platform as governor of the Bank of England to warn the world's financial elites about the risk of stranded assets and carbon bubbles now flirting with new pipelines under C-5 and invoking oil-industry jargon like 'decarbonized oil'?
Is it just his language that's changed, or has the new job pushed climate change off his radar?
All policy is climate policy
Not everyone in the climate community feels betrayed — at least, not yet.
The new prime minister doesn't lecture on climate like the old one. Does that mean he's forgotten about the climate crisis?
'It feels like we're still in a wait-and-see moment,' says Dale Beugin, executive vice president at the Canadian Climate Institute. 'I get the priority to go after nation-building projects. I get the priority to move on some of these big economic issues. Because that's where the moment is right now. I think that's pretty defensible. The trick will be to make sure that they can deliver on those shorter-term economic imperatives, while not losing the climate ones.'
Another word for 'shorter-term economic imperatives,' in today's Ottawa parlance, is 'Bill C-5.' As most of Canada is aware, Carney rushed that bill into law in record time entirely in the name of responding to the economic crisis posed by Trump's tariffs. And in order to get the votes needed to pass Bill C-5, Carney and his senior officials have had to find common cause with traditional adversaries — from prairie premiers like Danielle Smith to the federal Conservatives sitting opposite in the House of Commons.
'He's clearly balancing a number of delicate issues, including Alberta's concerns,' allows Rachel Samson, vice president of research at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
For Samson, the fact that Carney isn't lecturing Canadians about climate change the way his predecessor did doesn't mean he's stopped thinking about it.
'He's spent a lot of his career thinking about climate change and action on climate change. And fundamentally, I think the way that we're going to get action on climate change done is not by having big policy announcements and big claims of targets. It's going to be about embedding it into everything.'
By 'everything,' Samson means things like housing (where modular home building and green financing have the potential for a massive impact on Canada's emissions), defense spending (which Carney has said will include huge sums for critical mineral supply chains needed for clean energy), and wildfire protection (named by Carney as a top priority at the G7 he just hosted in Kananaskis – albeit without any mention of climate change.)
'To say climate change is only one thing, I think misses the broader context that it's really going to encompass every policy issue,' Samson says. 'So I don't personally have a problem with it being embedded within the conversation of other policy priorities.'
Samson allows that tradeoffs are inevitable, and that Canadians may have to brace themselves for a new pipeline or two.
' It seems like he will have to compromise on certain things and that may involve an oil pipeline; it may involve more LNG projects and, and so that certainly will disappoint people who are looking to reduce fossil fuel production,' she says. But Samson remains 'cautiously optimistic' that Carney's overall focus is still fixed on the energy transition. 'If some fossil fuel production is a way to get to that – is a way to raise the revenue and get the buy-in to accomplish those things and build out the infrastructure – with that long term goal in mind, I think I can get behind it.'
But those with a long memory may recall that is precisely the reasoning Justin Trudeau provided for expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline.
'The TMX project is a significant investment in Canadians and in Canada's future that will … fund the clean energy solutions that Canada needs to stay competitive on the global stage,' Trudeau said in announcing the purchase in 2019.
So the question under Carney becomes: when, exactly, does he mean what he says?
Pipeline promises
The reason Carney was able to rush Bill C-5 through the House of Commons so quickly was that he secured Conservative support. And one major reason Conservatives supported it was that they hoped it would usher in a new wave of 'conventional energy' pipelines. If Carney had explicitly promised to exclude fossil fuel from the legislation — if he'd framed it as being designed to accelerate Canada's energy transition — the process would likely have been far slower.
Conservatives were certainly delighted by Tim Hodgson, a fellow banker and the new minister of energy and natural resources, when he visited Calgary in May to speak with the oil patch. During that visit, Hodgson, who has previously sat on the board of oil sands producer MEG energy, promised federal support for new oil and gas pipelines, though he didn't get into specifics.
'It's very encouraging. This is exactly what we need,' Rich Kruger, CEO of Suncor (one of the biggest producers in the oil sands) told the Calgary Herald after Hodgson's talk.
But will Carney actually deliver the pipelines he and Hodgson have been dangling in front of the oil patch?
'I've been paying really close attention to what he's said about certain topics, like 'nation-building,'' says Chris Severson-Baker, the executive director of the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank based in Alberta. 'What is he actually saying about an oil pipeline, versus the words that others are putting in his mouth?'
'When talking about so-called 'conventional energy,'' — the industry term for fossil fuels — 'I've noticed that he's very careful to say that the scheme would have to make sense, or only a sensible project would be considered,' Severson-Baker says. He also had a very different takeaway from Tim Hodgson's May visit to Calgary.
'Hodgson came in and said to a bunch of oil and gas executives exactly what they wanted to hear,' he said. It wasn't that Hodgson was trying to deceive his audience; rather, Severson-Baker described him as 'a brand new [natural resources]NR-Can minister who hasn't been briefed by his own department yet. I don't actually have a lot of confidence that he knows what he's talking about when he made those statements.'
Meanwhile, the things Carney has said must be weighed against the things he hasn't. On Bill C-5 and elsewhere, the prime minister has floated climate-friendly projects like a national energy grid, a huge offshore wind-power project in Nova Scotia, and high-speed rail connecting Windsor to Quebec. Shortly before the G7 summit, he published the list of priorities he wanted to discuss (the host leader gets to set the agenda). In addition to wildfires, Carney named 'energy security' as a top concern – but nowhere did 'conventional energy' get mentioned; instead, he named 'critical mineral supply chains,' an unambiguous reference to clean energy.
That emphasis extends to Carney's recent commitment in Brussels to massively increase Canada's defense spending, to five per cent of the national GDP — some $150 billion per year —– by 2035. In subsequent news conferences, Carney was quick to point out that a third of that spending would go to securing critical minerals and associated infrastructure, like ports and electricity grids. He may not have mentioned climate change, but he didn't express any support for fossil fuels, either.
That leaves a lot of room for everyone to hear what they want.
The PMO didn't respond to a request for comment on this story, though the ministry of environment and climate change did provide a statement: 'Climate action remains a core priority of this government and a defining pillar of Canada's economic future. As we build the strongest economy in the G7, we know climate action is central to our plan for a strong, secure, and competitive country.'
That sounds more like something Carney's predecessor would say than Carney himself. But the sentiment may not be too far off. As Rachel Samson put it, advancing climate policy – however that looks, or sounds, 'isn't about a moral highground or anything. It's just smart policy.'