OTTAWA—As of Tuesday, for the first time since 2008, there was no consumer “carbon tax” anywhere in Canada.
Mark Carney hopes you realized that.
“You may notice that you’ll soon be paying up to 18 cents less per litre than you did yesterday to fill up your tank,” the Liberal leader Tuesday, as the long-standing carbon price dropped to zero across the country.
“That’s immediate relief,” he said.
Once a signature piece of the Liberals’ prescription to fight climate change, consumer carbon pricing has lost virtually all mainstream political support. Carney moved to kill it on his first day as prime minister. The federal NDP confirmed this week that they would ensure it stays dead. And Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, not only wants to chop down the consumer carbon price, but also axe the national requirement for a price on heavy industrial greenhouse gas pollution.
To some observers, it’s the most prominent evidence of a shift in Canadian politics, with anxiety about the cost of living and U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of economic warfare and annexation dominating centre stage. The result is an election campaign where all parties have emphasized measures like tax cuts and housing policies to make life more affordable, with promises to unleash a building boom in resource infrastructure — including, for the Liberals and Conservatives, fossil fuel pipelines and export facilities — to bulk up the Canadian economy and reduce reliance on the United States.
And that means less of a focus, at least so far, on climate action.
“The existential crisis that Canadians are grappling with is not, will our planet be a suitable place for us to live in the medium to long term, but: will Canada exist? Will our economy be crushed? All those things absolutely take precedence,” said David Coletto, chief executive officer of the polling firm Abacus Data.
Coletto’s most recent polling, from last week, shows only seven per cent of the online survey’s 1,800 respondents put “dealing with climate change and reducing carbon emissions” in their top two campaign issues. That’s compared with 47 per cent who chose “reducing your cost of living” and 35 per cent who named “dealing with Donald Trump” in their top two vote-deciding concerns.
The margin of error for a comparable random sample of the same size is +/- 2.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
“There’s no incentive for our political leaders right now, in this moment, to be talking a lot about (climate change),” Coletto said.
For Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, the current campaign feels like “a race to the bottom,” with the Liberals, NDP and Conservatives promising to dismantle consumer carbon pricing.
On Tuesday, as Ottawa lifted the national consumer carbon price, British Columbia’s NDP government scrapped the provincial carbon tax that was implemented as a North American-first in 2008. Alberta and Saskatchewan, anticipating a potential Conservative win on April 28, have signalled they want to ditch or change their own industrial carbon pricing now that Poilievre has promised to remove the federal requirement for all provinces and territories to have one with a minimum level of stringency.
Only Québec maintains carbon pricing across its economy, in the form of a long-standing cap-and-trade system rather than a carbon tax.
“Political cowardice is spreading faster than COVID,” said Green co-leader Elizabeth May told the Star on Tuesday, adding her party supports carbon pricing as a “necessary but insufficient” part of serious climate action.
“I want to see real climate action coming out of some other party in this country,” she said. “So far, if you care about climate, you’ve got one option. You’ve got to vote Green.”
Abreu argued the backtracking is the result of a successful “scapegoating” where politicians have associated carbon pricing with rising costs, when the reality — according to studies like one in December from University of Calgary economists — is that the policy had a minimal impact on inflation in recent years.
She is concerned this logic will extend to other climate policies, which she is watching for ahead of further campaign announcements from other political parties.
On Tuesday, in Newfoundland, Poilievre promised to fulfil all of the policy demands from a group of major oil and gas companies. That includes repealing the Trudeau government’s federal Impact Assessment Act, which the Conservatives claim has blocked fossil fuel pipelines; speeding up major project approvals so decisions are reached within six months; and scrapping the incoming regulatory “cap” on emissions from the oil and gas sector, which Alberta’s government and the industry have argued would curtail production and hurt the economy.
Poilievre also reiterated his pledge to ditch the federal industrial carbon price, and deliver loan guarantees to help Indigenous communities profit from resource development.
Carney, meanwhile, confirmed Tuesday that he would keep the Impact Assessment Act, while also speeding up reviews for key projects in part by allowing provincial assessments to stand in for federal ones.
The Liberals have also said they would keep the emissions cap and look to support new fossil fuel pipelines and exports, all while exceeding the 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas pollution to at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels.
Carney has not yet spelled out how the Liberals would do that, but Liberal spokesperson Carolyn Svonkin said Tuesday more climate policy details would be released later in the campaign. During the Liberal leadership race, Carney promised to replace the consumer carbon price with a system in which the government would sell credits to big business and use the money to help people buy green improvements like energy-efficient furnaces and electric cars.
David MacNaughton, who served as Justin Trudeau’s ambassador to Washington during the NAFTA renegotiation and now sits on the Canada-U.S. advisory council to the prime minister, said in an interview that the need to reset Canada’s economic and security relationship with the U.S. in the Trump era changes how Ottawa needs to look at many policies, including on climate.
“We have to do smarter things about creating more wealth in the country, and that has to do with exporting our natural gas to bring down coal usage in other parts of the country. We don’t have to be anti-greenhouse gas emissions. What we have (to do) is to be smart about it,” he said.
The NDP, meanwhile, has said it would scrap federal support for the fossil fuel sector and redirect billions of dollars to funding home retrofits for more than 3 million Canadians. Party spokesperson Erin Burchett said Tuesday that more climate policies will be unveiled later in the campaign.
To Michael Bernstein, president and chief executive officer of the policy institute Clean Prosperity, the political focus on economic growth and affordability makes sense in the current context. The hope is that pushing for faster approvals for major projects also unlocks opportunities for green energy and technology like carbon capture, he said, arguing that looking for new markets for existing fossil fuels shouldn’t undermine the shift away from greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’ve got to take a balanced approach to these issues, so I think what’s playing out is understandable and appropriate,” he said.
Abreu said she believes Canadians still care about governments taking action on climate change, noting the warnings that runaway global warming will further fuel more damaging extreme weather that is already imposing costs.
“Ignoring the climate crisis will only make those affordability concerns worse,” she said.
With files from Tonda MacCharles
