The moment we walked away from the climate crisis

When Mark Carney killed the carbon tax, Canada gave up its last shred of honesty about addressing the climate crisis. Oil companies got their way. We have built them pipelines, we have passed legislation to ease restrictions on their infrastructure projects and we are now pandering to an astro-turfed movement Alberta that is funded by the oil and gas sector and which, if it ever became a more serious threat than simply a partisan shill show, would threaten the unity of the country.

We are a climate change pariah, a position that we have never been very far away from. But it is clear now that the Canadian policy sphere is far more interested in crating the conditions for profiting from climate change than it is from doing our part to address it. We are working to enable a bunch of people who are shorting life on earth.

Catherine McKenna, the former federal environment minister, was quite candid about why the carbon tax didn’t stand a chance once the oil and gas lobbies, aided by a movement of “conservatives” who were doing their bidding, got their tendrils into the policy shop. She has published a new memoir and excerpted part of it on a Substack post which makes for fascinating reading.

In the end, Canada lost a climate policy that worked to reduce emissions in the most cost effective way, ensured that most families were better off (especially middle- and low-income ones), while creating an incentive for people to save even more money by choosing more energy efficient options, and which provided an opportunity for businesses to innovate and develop clean solutions. Losing a policy which leads to one of the most significant reductions in Canada’s emissions makes hitting the country’s climate target even harder.

Justin Trudeau can take the blame for a lot of this. Carney too. We will never hit the targets we need to. The Conservatives, who backed off their own preferred policy choice and convinced the Canadian electorate that a program that fairly priced carbon AND put money in the pockets of most Canadians was the height of evil.

Now you have Pierre Poilievre touting a further reduction in industrial carbon pricing to somehow make groceries more affordable for average people. He’s wrong about that, but Conservatives these days will cite any rationale, no matter how flimsy as long as taxes on the wealthy can be reduced.

The net result of all of this bad policy and a decade of stupid politics is a world in which there will be no more climate change solutions addressed by Canadian lawmakers until such a time as the market prices renewables so low that braying for markets for bitumen will look as archaic as whale oil. And our country will not be part of that conversation, because we will be relying on Chinese and European technology and resources to do it while still trying to jam sticky oil into tubes and send it to the coast to markets that don’t want it at a price that doesn’t make mining it profitable.