When Ontario’s boreal forest erupted into flame halfway through July, Canadians were reminded of something they hadn’t experienced in a while: the material consequences of a changing climate. Scenes at once shocking and familiar seared our screens — titanic walls of flame photographed from a fleeing boat, video from the inside of a moving train encased in flame, Toronto glowing orange with the worst air quality on earth. Climate change was back on the public radar.
Key points
- Prime Minister Mark Carney assesses geopolitical chaos as a greater threat to Canada than climate change
- Carney views environmental protection as a political liability, and polls suggest he’s right
- Carney’s promises around clean energy production fall short of the money and urgency invested in the oil patch
Almost instantly, however, it was displaced by another destructive force whose grip on our imagination has proven even stronger. “The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” US president Donald Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social. Accusing Prime Minister Mark Carney of “refusing to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal,” Trump threatened to retaliate with tariffs if Carney didn’t find a way to put the fires out. Flexing the full power of unintended irony — this is the man dismantling his country’s Environmental Protection Agency — Trump added: “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence.”
Indeed Mr. President, it is. The increased flammability of Canada’s northern forests is one of the purer signals of a heating planet. Unlike forests further south, where a century of fire suppression and monoculture plantation have also played a role, the northern boreal remained largely untouched. There’s only one factor causing it to burn more than before: a hotter, drier climate. And the primary force behind that is humanity’s combustion of fossil fuel.
Carney knows all this. But rather than say so, he was forced — conveniently, some might argue — to address the complaints Trump raised. Instead of talking about root causes, Carney thanked Canada’s firefighters, talked about the scale of their efforts, and reminded Trump that Canadians have been known to help Americans put out their forest fires too. These became our national media’s talking points. They are valid and important observations. But they fail entirely to acknowledge the reason why our wildfires are getting so big, so often. The only politician of any stature in Canada who went there was the federal New Democratic Party leader, Avi Lewis, who told CNN:
Apparently, we have to remind everyone of these facts: wildfires are getting more and more devastating because they’re being turbocharged by global warming. Global warming is being caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
The same day Lewis said that, Trump went ahead and imposed a fresh wave of tariffs on Canada (ostensibly for reasons that had nothing to do with wildfire) that took over the headlines. The fires were still burning, but the conversation moved on.
That entire sequence of events made me reflect on a dynamic I’ve been wrestling with since Carney was elected. Like so many in Canada’s environmental community, I’ve felt betrayed by Carney’s full-throated support for the oil patch, exemplified by his collaboration with Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, to build a new pipeline to British Columbia’s coast. Last December, I wrote that Carney has abandoned climate. But a lot has happened since then — and not just in the boreal.
One by one, the prime minister has killed or drastically watered down almost every key plank of his predecessor’s climate plan. That plan — the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change — had more than fifty policy components but, at its heart, was a simple grand bargain. Alberta would get the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion in exchange for supporting four big-ticket items: a consumer carbon tax, an emissions cap on the oil sands, an electric vehicles mandate for the auto sector, and Clean Electricity Regulations.
Carney cancelled the first two of those before Christmas. Then, in February, he cancelled the EV mandate, which would have forced automakers to make 100 percent of their cars and light trucks electric by 2035. In May, Carney replaced the Clean Electricity Regulations with a new National Electricity Strategy that will allow for more natural gas (as opposed to renewables) to be used as a fuel source in Canada’s power stations. The next day, Carney announced he was weakening the industrial carbon tax that charges heavy industry for its emissions (as opposed to private citizens, as the consumer price had done): instead of charging industry $170 per tonne of CO2 emissions by 2030, as former prime minister Justin Trudeau had planned, the goal is now to reach $130 per tonne by 2040.
There are caveats to most of these walk-backs. Canada’s electric grid is already 80 percent carbon-free, for instance, among the cleanest on earth; by loosening regulations, Carney hopes to expand that grid as fast as possible, a laudable goal. It’s also true that the industrial carbon tax was in such shambles (thanks to Alberta’s opposition) that Trudeau’s 2030 target had become a fantasy; by getting Alberta to agree to a lower price, Carney argued, he was trading that fantasy for something real. As the prime minister likes to say when talking about climate policy, he’s after “results, not rhetoric.”
But that line can itself be interpreted as the rhetoric of diminished ambitions. For no matter how you slice it, Carney’s defanging of Canada’s climate policy will result in higher emissions. And the day before Canada Day, Carney finally admitted it.
The changes we have made will mean that our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan. But in my judgement, that plan was not sustainable over the long term. It would have been too expensive for Canadians.
This acknowledgement was tucked inside a seventeen-minute address on YouTube titled “Forward Guidance: Canada’s Energy Future.” It was the most fulsome account of his reasoning on energy and climate policy the prime minister has given since taking office. The above statement got most of the attention, especially when wildfires broke out two weeks later and the words “sustainable” and “too expensive” took on a dark irony. But the whole thing is worth a listen.
Over the course of those seventeen minutes, Carney articulated an all-of-the-above energy strategy designed to buffer Canada not just from climate change but from the unprecedented threats to our democracy tearing at Canada from both within and without.
Our neighbourhood hasn’t been this hostile since when Canada was founded. We must establish stability amidst this chaos. The energy transition will be a source of great stability in the long run. But while it’s underway it can equally be a source of disruption. No country is better positioned to thrive in both eras than Canada, and we need not allow the transition from one era to another to pull us apart.
The idea that Canada could be pulled apart isn’t something most environmental advocates have to grapple with. We’re not used to considering more than one existential threat at a time. Things like tariffs or Alberta separatism don’t often enter our calculus. Nor does figuring out how to pay for health care, education, and all the other public services that are in various states of crisis — wind and solar farms, which may lower the cost of electricity but don’t provide billions in royalty cheques. The prime minister doesn’t have that luxury.
I’m not saying this to exonerate Carney’s embrace of the oil patch; mostly, I’m just trying to understand it. For on July 2, two days after his “Energy Future” address, Carney joined Premier Smith at the Calgary Stampede to endorse her new pipeline proposal: a million-barrel-per-day pipeline which would largely follow the same route as Trans Mountain, deviating near the end to a terminus just south of Vancouver’s Fraser River. That terminal would be built in a delicate estuary ecosystem that is already under tremendous industrial stress. No wonder Carney has also floated the idea of giving cabinet the power to override the Species at Risk Act in order to approve select major projects.
Why? The question has been building for a year now, growing more acute with each new federal announcement. Why did the former United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance become Canada’s leading enabler of fossil fuel expansion?
If we’re to take him at face value, Carney has calculated that the short-term dangers of geopolitical chaos — a mad king in the White House, Alberta rattling the nation’s cage, a global economy teetering on the abyss — are the paramount threats facing Canada. We need to overcome those before we can decarbonize the economy.
From my perspective, there is no more important goal than a strong, united country working together in our common interest. The goal remains the same, but as times have changed, we must change our plan to get there. We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix — oil and gas — to meet a short-term goal.
If polls are anything to go by, that message resonates with a huge number of Canadians. Carney and the federal Liberals remain as popular as ever. And on July 16 — just as parts of Ontario were going up in flames and dousing millions of people in smoke — Angus Reid released a poll that found 63 percent of Canadians support Alberta’s new pipeline proposal (even in BC, more than 60 percent were in favour).
These are bitter pills for the environmental community to swallow. Clearly, the oil patch is winning the messaging battle, to say nothing of the policy war. But not all is lost. Carney devoted a great deal of his Energy Future talk to electrification — the holy grail of the energy transition — promising to double Canada’s electricity production and demonstrating a technical grasp of the subject that should provide at least some solace to climate-concerned Canadians.
Electric machines are two to four times more efficient than those they replace. So as we electrify our transportation, our buildings, our industry, the electricity slice of our energy budget grows, but the entire pie shrinks.
Many on the environmental left have accused Carney of being worse for climate than any Conservative. But if anyone’s ever heard a Conservative politician speak like that, I’d like to hear about it.
That said, they’re only words for now. Carney’s promises around electrification and clean energy production don’t have anywhere near the money and political urgency he’s lavished on the oil patch. That asymmetry feels especially acute when the skies fill with fire and smoke; on those days, the warping influence of the oil industry on Canada’s climate discourse is laid bare, and the value of a strong climate policy becomes self-evident.
Unfortunately, those moments tend to be brief. After a few horrific days of reckoning, Canadians were distracted, once again, by the US president’s antics. But we’re only halfway through this wildfire season and barely a quarter of the way into Carney’s mandate.
For better and for worse, this isn’t over yet.