By Mitchell Beer

This Weekender mostly combines material we published in late February and early April, but the context is a bit more urgent…again.

Monday is Election Day in Canada, and with less than 100 hours to go before polls open, Donald Trump reinserted himself into the campaign, telling TIME Magazine he’s “really not trolling” with his mutterings about turning us into a 51st state.

In an interview published Friday, Trump brought the focus back to the annexation threat that The Weekender and many others have been warning about for months. He repeated his false claims that the U.S. is subsidizing Canada, declaring that “the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”

“It now seems increasingly obvious that Trump’s expansionist aspirations are no fleeting fancy,” CBC writes. “He kept quiet for a while, leading some to wonder whether he’d gotten it out of his system.” But “in recent days, the president has been blunt in different encounters with media that he seriously would love to see Canada become a state.”

Trump’s apparent seriousness about annexation leads to two questions, the answers to which may well be shaped by the election results Monday night:

• What are the prospects for Canada to form new trading relationships with other regions and countries that are facing Trump’s malignant wrath, to diversify our economies and stand together against a common threat?

• How can climate and energy strategy become part of the glue that holds this new alliance together, and what policies and real-world actions will Canada need to join in?

The World Pushes Back

The astonishing thing over the last few weeks was not that Donald Trump went ahead with his threat to blow up the global trading system by imposing tariffs on about 60 countries, including two economically mischievous islands populated only by penguins.

It was that the rest of the world was so fast to push back, ready and determined to move on from an era of U.S. economic dominance. That a promising approach to building a new trading bloc that bypasses the rogue regime in the White House went from online conversation to serious proposition in scarcely a week.

That if you surveyed the scene from just the right angle, a new, emerging bloc might be able to cover more ground and tackle multiple problems at once by pivoting to low-carbon goods and real decarbonization technologies.

And that Canada might yet place itself at the centre of the world’s next great, low-carbon trading alliance, as long as our incoming federal government has the insight and inclination to play along. (Which is a longabouts way of saying…your vote matters.)

In the 100 or so hours after Trump’s self-styled “Liberation Day” announcement earlier this month, we saw a fast flurry of analyses on the slapdash, amateur-hour process behind the decision, the immediate impact on jobs, a shock reaction from global stock markets that has continued through the month, and the apparent certainty that this spells the end of global trade as we’ve known it.

But there are more interesting, even hopeful and positive questions to ask, beginning with:

If every end is also a beginning, what’s next?

If the tariffs are really dealing a death blow to the established international trading system, what if this undercuts the fossil fuel industry as badly as Trump’s direct hostility and interference have devastated the U.S. renewable energy sector and climate justice community?

For Canada, now that we’ve declared that there’s no way back to an era when our economy was over-dependent on our neighbour to the south, what else do we gain by getting closer to countries that are farther along on their climate and decarbonization journey?

And how can we work with our future trading partners to accelerate the shift?

Sleeping Beside an Elephant

The roiling, ranting, manufactured crisis that Donald Trump has brought to our doorstep has communities, countries, and whole continents scrambling for solutions. So we might as well admit and embrace the reality staring right at us—Trump has created a moment when the sense of what’s “realistic” gets tossed in the air, when unexpected lines of thought suddenly make a whole lot more sense.

For Canada, that response begins with a level of unity and shared purpose that we haven’t seen in many decades—prompting former prime minister Jean Chrétien to slyly declare that he would have nominated Trump for an Order of Canada if only the honour were available to convicted criminals.

It extends into some serious, long-overdue conversations about how to make our economy truly independent. We’ve always known we were sleeping beside an elephant, as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told the Washington Press Club in 1969.

But there’s been little serious talk about dialling up our economic relationships in other parts of the world sufficiently to dial back our dependence on the U.S. Until now.

It began with a post by Social Capital Partners Chair Jon Shell, suggesting a new trading bloc with the economic clout to survive, thrive, and leave the United States behind.

“We know what Donald Trump is afraid of,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Now let’s organize around it.”

The EU, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia (I’m now calling them “EU + 5”) collectively have 760 million people and control 34% of the global economy and vast quantities of natural resources. We are an obvious threat to the U.S. and to China if we were to organize.

The best way to beat a bully is for the rest of the group to rise up against him.

The rest of Shell’s scenario is that much more plausible in the year when Canada holds the rotating chair of the Group of 7 forum of industrialized nations, and will be hosting the G7 leaders’ summit in June.

The most powerful signal to give Trump would be for this group to meet in a very public way, ideally in Canada, so the meeting would play out on American TV in the right time zones. The stats on the economic and resource might of this new group would scroll across the bottom of Fox News. [If we can assume that Fox would even carry the story—Ed.]

A joint statement at the end pledging to work together as friends and allies to ensure a resilient and prosperous future for our populations would be a powerful message. Quick wins could be action on Ukraine and munitions manufacturing.

First and last, it needs to be 100% clear—and for Trump, spelled out with a Sharpie in simple, single-syllable words with lots of golf analogies—that no one is taking this lying down.

“My strong recommendation to Canada, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union is to join together to create a free trade zone that excludes the United States, imposing at least a 10% tariff on all imports from America,” writes Bill Clinton-era U.S. labour secretary Robert Reich. “Don’t negotiate. Do this now so you’ll be negotiating from a position of power.”

G7? Meet the ‘Free 7’ (By Comparison)

As Reich’s formula suggests, a useful add-on to Shell’s thinking would be to build on Canada’s relationship with its more reliable trading partner in North America by including Mexico in an EU + 6.

And by declaring an emphasis on clean energy and decarbonization trade, the countries could jump-start their economies after Trump’s tariff attack, boost affordability and local self-reliance across the entire bloc, support Ukraine’s reconstruction, and prevent military conflict in the first place—and oh, by the way, move closer to meeting their climate targets.

The focus on climate and carbon would be consistent with the accelerated priorities the European Union has been setting since 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine turned energy efficiency and renewables into a geopolitical security strategy for countries that were too dependent on Russian gas.

And this general line of thought has been gaining traction. Within a week, the idea of a wider trading bloc had broken out from social media and Substack newsletters to general media in a Toronto Star post by John Austin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Brookings Institution. His formulation brought together the EU, Japan, the UK, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand in a group of nations that “would dwarf the U.S., as well as the economies of China combined with its ally Russia.”

Given America’s new stance, now is the time for the G7 member nations to disinvite the U.S. from the group, and morph to a new organization: a “Free 7.” It would be a new forum in which the nations that still believe in democracy, free markets, freedom of expression, and free trade would collaborate to strengthen their collective hand and push back against authoritarians—which now includes the U.S.

The work of the new Free 7 would be the urgent task of building an international coalition that stands up to the authoritarian axis—and successfully contains it. This means standing up to pressure from the U.S.

Take this as a thumbs-up for the basic idea, not necessarily the branding Austin attaches to it. It would take a whole other edition of The Weekender (or more) to unpack what we mean by “Free” and how well or widely it applies to the countries in the group, certainly including Canada.

But the point of contrast with full-on authoritarians like Trump still makes a lot of sense—to counter the rush to fascism that we’re seeing in the U.S. and, if it goes this way, to reignite the response to climate change and the energy transition. That general line of thought makes South Korea an interesting addition to the group after an unequivocal population pushed back against an egregious assault on the country’s democracy—unlike their U.S. counterparts, who splintered in response to Trump’s 2020 election loss and the deadly insurrection attempt that followed.

Carbon is the New Tariff

In February, The Weekender reported that the emerging, global demand for low-emissions trade isn’t just a North American phenomenon—nor even a trend that North America is leading. And that carbon controls could soon become the new tariff.

The European Union adopted the world’s first carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) in 2023, and its implementation is set to begin this year. That bit of progress landed in the middle of the Liberal leadership campaign earlier this year when then-candidate Mark Carney proposed to replace the hated consumer carbon tax by introducing a CBAM regime with other like-minded countries.

That thinking leads toward a plausible and really promising future where climate impact is a key criterion guiding trading relationships, as long as the system is rigorous enough to deliver real-world results. If a country is seriously and measurably reducing emissions, it qualifies. If it isn’t, it gets politely but firmly left behind.

As far back as January, Canada’s future trading partners were already making moves in the right direction. In the first week after Trump’s inauguration, a small flurry of analysis indicated that the rest of the world was moving on—not least because countries have already seen eight years of punitive, provocative U.S. tariffs under the Joe Biden presidency as well as Trump 1.0, and they’re quite rightly fed up.

The trend was most definitely paralleled by an emerging, global shift in energy priorities. “Most major economies are investing in ever-cheaper solar and wind power,” the New York Times wrote. “Even as coal, oil, and gas still power the global economy, and more fossil fuels are burned year after year, the movement globally is toward heavy investment in solar, wind, and batteries, the prices of which have fallen sharply in recent years.”

Time to Stand for What Matters

But in international trade relations, as in the fight against climate change, standing against what we can’t and won’t accept is just half the battle. The next successful trading bloc will only fulfill John Austin’s vision of a “Free 7” if we’re very clear and deliberate about the kind of economic activity we want.

In a Toronto Star op ed, Savanna McGregor, Grand Chief of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council, said Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “Canada First” National Energy Corridor wouldn’t meet that standard.

Reading Mr. Poilievre’s announcement, I am left wondering why it does not mention Indigenous people even passingly, other than to expect fancifully that we give “approval … before any money is spent.” Surely he knows Canada’s constitution requires Indigenous consultation, accommodation, and ultimately consent to build major infrastructure inside his National Energy Corridor? How can there be consultation (to say nothing of accommodation and consent) if the corridor is “pre-approved” before anyone has the blueprints for what infrastructure will be built and where?

McGregor asks how city dwellers would respond to word of a “pre-approved” major development in their own back yard, with no indication of whether it’s a school, a shopping mall, or a radioactive waste dump.

It sounds ridiculous and contemptuous, yet this is exactly how Mr. Poilievre and many others hold Indigenous communities today (there is a radioactive waste dump on Algonquin land right now). Obviously, pushing a development decision without identifying the development would never fly in a city where the residents have no constitutional right to be consulted—so it definitely will not fly for Indigenous people having that right.

“Ironically, the pre-approved corridor Mr. Poilievre wants to speed development up would nearly paralyze it,” McGregor wrote, citing court cases that would slow down a campaign promise that she describes as a “war with Indigenous nations”.

Then there’s the question of who gains if those projects are fast-tracked. In a separate post for the Star, Toronto Metropolitan University associate professor Shari Pasternak and Emily Lowan, fossil fuel supply lead at Climate Action Network Canada (of which Energy Mix Productions is a member), connected dots to some of the main movers and shakers in Trump’s inner circle. Which means that projects like the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline and the Ksi Lisims LNG export terminal “are now making Canada vulnerable to Trump’s predatory goal of North American energy dominance.”

Pasternak and Lowan wrote:

The solution is not to copy Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” approach with a thin gloss of maple syrup over top; it is respect for Indigenous jurisdiction and a just transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Canadian pride should come from ethical investment and reconciliation—not backstopping U.S. corporations.

We’ve all heard the too-easy, too-glib line that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And once, just once, I wish the pundits and prognosticators who keep talking that way would turn their attention to the climate crisis and the fossil fuel industries that drive it. Or the nature and biodiversity crisis. Or the food security crisis. Or the multiple, wrenching human rights crises going on around the world as we virtually speak. No need to be fussy.

But here’s the thing so many of us have been hoping for—since the U.S. election result in November, and since around 8:10 PM Eastern last June 27, as we watched then-U.S. president Joe Biden implode onstage in his debate against Trump. Faced with the worst we’ve ever seen from Trump, the #ElbowsUp mantra is extending far beyond Canada, into a global coalition so wide that it might be able to withstand this moment, recover, thrive—and thrive green.

There are no guarantees, and it’ll take a while to see how things land. But the first step in building the solution we need is to envision it. And over the last few weeks, that’s been happening.

The post Opinion: Trump is serious about annexing Canada. How will climate and energy policy bring us the allies we need? appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Michael Sambasivam 

As Canada’s greatest ally has decided to break our trust and bare its teeth, Canadians have made clear a desire to reduce our reliance on the United States as a trading partner. One result of this turning point has been increased support for accelerating and expanding Canada’s liquified natural gas industry, and cashing in on it as a potentially high-value export.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has called for the development of LNG infrastructure to deliver the energy resource to European buyers, while Liberal Leader Mark Carney more broadly stated a need for Canada to “draw… on [its] vast resources of conventional and clean energy.”

This political push for LNG expansion is timely marketing, given Canadians’ growing fear that the country is economically shackled to a U.S. political entity prone to erratic decision-making. Support for LNG appeals to the popular reasoning that Canada’s economic strength is contingent upon its conventional energy industry, and it also fits within the climate lens, with proponents of the sector framing LNG expansion as an emissions reduction opportunity.

But all of these premises are fundamentally flawed.

Developing direct access to global gas markets might decrease our dependence on American buyers, but it would further concentrate Canada’s reliance on the stability of fossil fuel prices at a time when the global LNG market is becoming oversupplied. This shift would also divert capital – both political and monetary – away from sectors that are more clearly aligned with a transition economy.

And there’s one more significant factor: It is becoming increasingly clear that LNG’s reputation as a “transition fuel” is unfounded, with the potential for LNG to displace coal emissions unsupported both economically and scientifically.

Making LNG a key part of Canada’s energy exports is a long-term process that will lock in our role in a world where energy demand patterns are shifting rapidly. While backing LNG expansion may look tempting in the face of newfound American aggression, it would also increase the risk of our economy getting to the station after the LNG train has already left. 

Canada is poorly positioned to compete in an LNG glut

Canadian oil and gas companies have been pushing to expand LNG exports for the last decade. LNG Canada’s new $40-billion shipping port at Kitimat, B.C., which just opened this spring, is Canada’s first major LNG export project; six others are in varying stages of development. These would cumulatively add over 12 per cent to the existing global LNG supply, aligning with a boom that is expected to show 40-per-cent growth in LNG availability between 2024 and 2028.

It has been over a decade since the International Energy Agency (IEA) anticipated a “golden age of gas,” and while suppliers have responded to the call, demand has faltered among Canada’s potential buyers. The war in Ukraine spiked world gas prices, disincentivizing South and Southeast Asian markets from expanding their LNG intake capacity. And while European nations expanded their LNG usage in order to decrease reliance on Russian pipeline gas, the EU’s energy regulator predicts that Europe’s LNG demand has peaked and will steadily decline over the back half of the 2020s.

China has introduced extensive policies promoting domestic procurement of gas, to be potentially topped off by a massive new pipeline from Russia. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea are planning to expand nuclear capacity in order to reduce fossil fuel use for power generation.

It all means that, globally, LNG suppliers will compete fiercely for customers, even in circumstances where the world does not quickly decarbonize. Projections for supply far outpace those for demand, even under the IEA’s least climate-ambitious scenario.

Given that context, Canada’s high break-even prices spell risk. Our analysis found that Canadian LNG projects have infrastructure costs that far exceed industry norms, and break-even costs that are above the projected price of viability.

All told, Canada is late to the game and its LNG production and delivery costs leave it poorly positioned to compete for market share. A politically driven fever to counter U.S. trade aggression with LNG expansion may well backfire, creating billions of dollars of stranded asset risk while wasting resources and valuable time.

The post Opinion: Banking on LNG exports is a high-risk gamble for Canada’s future growth appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

With the polls closing in eight days, we took a long weekend road trip to staid, suburban Ottawa. A boisterous Mark Carney rally had the spirit but not the details to get climate back on the agenda.

With Canada’s federal election just eight days away, Liberal leader Mark Carney wowed the crowd at a Canada Strong rally in the suburban riding of Nepean, where he’s running for a seat in the House of Commons, pledging to push back and keep pushing against the most immediate existential threat Canada faces.

So of course The Weekender went on a three-hour road trip on a Sunday afternoon before rewriting this week’s post and almost renaming our publication The Midnighter. Good thing it’s a long weekend.

With Never 51 signs in every direction, and a little girl in Easter bunny ears showing her #ElbowsUp while she sat on her dad’s shoulders, Carney pitched his all-hands effort against the rogue regime in the White House. That would be the rolling disaster that began with Donald Trump declaring economic warfare against Canada, followed by repeated threats to annex us as a 51st state—recently confirmed by press secretary Karoline Leavitt. (Pro tip: Ain’t going to happen.)

Trump “is trying to break us so that America can own us,” Carney declared. He repeated his now-familiar line that that the wantonly destructive tariffs and snide, expansionist rhetoric from the Oval Office have “changed forever our relationship with the United States. That old relationship is over.”

The partisan crowd in Nepean loved it. But it was also the right message to capture the moment of urgency that has united Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

And it had the tone and many of the elements that we’ll need to bring climate change and its solutions back to the top of the national agenda, whoever forms the next government after the dust settles April 28.

How to Tackle a Crisis

Throughout this high-stakes campaign, there’s been a lot of frustration that climate change has scarcely been on the agenda. But if you listened to Carney’s language today on the sovereignty crisis, you could see some of the contours of the climate response we’ve been waiting and working for for decades. Not so much in the specific policy planks, but in the overall approach.

He stressed that Canadians and our governments are responding to a severe, cascading threat “with purpose and with hope.”

He acknowledged the moments when governments have to step up with “overwhelming force”, to “lead when the private sector is retreating under anxiety and uncertainty”.

He cast his lot with practical, pragmatic solutions. “When I see something that’s not working, I change it.”

He warned that the reflexive negativity in some corners of the political spectrum “won’t pay the rent or mortgage”, and neither will a soaring commitment to rescue plastic straws. Above all, he said, “don’t ever call Canada stupid,” as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre apparently did in a selected clip from an interview with right wing provocateur Jordan Peterson.

And Carney painted a picture of a hopeful future where today’s younger generations won’t have to worry about the economic crisis, “because we’ll take care of it.”

A lot of it was standard fare for a political newbie, introducing himself to the constituents he hopes to represent. Like when he credited his parents with raising him to believe in hard work, community, and taking care of each other, his hockey coaches for teaching him to play hard and “stay humble” (a line that some of his past Bank of England staff might dispute).

But the speech also pointed to the patterns of thought and action we’ll need when the sovereignty crisis is no longer taking up all the oxygen in the room. We’ll need it even sooner when the next government, whatever its political stripe, looks to the tools in the climate solutions toolbox that can support us in the sovereignty fight.

So by all means, let’s start by getting our country through the immediate threat that a rampaging U.S. president and his equally delusional henchfolk have brought to our doorstep, make sure we get through it healthy and whole. But we can also build on the principles Carney just articulated and get on with the climate fight we thought we’d signed on for before Trump forced us to change the channel.

Leaders’ Debate Misses the Moment

An unsung but possibly important moment in Nepean was when Canadian-British economist and climate policy expert Diana Fox Carney introduced her husband to the crowd, describing him as a “constant learner” and a good listener. From the back-and-forth during the national leaders’ debate Thursday evening, it’s pretty clear that those will be essential skills for all four of the “contestants,” as Poilievre called them. Carney included.

When climate change has shown up in this election campaign, it’s been at the pivot point between two competing plans for Canada-wide energy corridors.

Poilievre is promising a new generation of fossil fuel pipelines that no investor is interested in building, aimed at delivering oil and gas to overseas customers that will be well on their way to decarbonizing their energy systems by the time the infrastructure is built. By then, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said Thursday night, Trump will be 90 years old and the immediate threat will be long gone.

Carney is touting an east-west electricity grid as a “nation-building project” to “secure Canadians’ access to affordable, reliable, clean, Canadian electricity”, supported by a new First and Last Mile Fund to kick-start critical mineral projects and build the clean energy supply chain.

Poilievre has evidently convinced his supporters that “pre-approved” projects built along a designated national corridor can be conjured up in six months (and there are some Indigenous leaders and constitutional law experts who would like a word). Carney is saying two years, still a lightning fast timeline that concerns environmental assessment experts.

But there’s another landmine in the Liberal leader’s path.

In the course of the campaign, he has quite appropriately focused more on clean electricity than fossil fuels. And while he was still running for the Liberal Party leadership, he talked about negotiating a carbon border adjustment with like-minded trading partners, in what would amount to a tariff on high-emitting products.

But in the leaders’ debate, he still defaulted to carbon capture and storage (CCS) and small modular nuclear reactors as technologies that Canada will need to decarbonize its energy system. It fell to Blanchet, once again, to correct the record.

“Sorry to crash your party,” he said, “but carbon capture is a fairy tale.” (He might have added that the CCS industry has admitted as much.)

So getting onboard with a real least-cost energy strategy is the first place we’ll need to see Carney the learner and listener step up. The second missed signal is one that none of the four leaders picked up in the debate.

What’s In It for the Folks Back Home?

The bigger disconnect is the one that could keep climate discussions toward the bottom of the agenda, long after Trump and his acolytes are just a scary nightmare in the rear view mirror.

A colleague of mine likes to say that not that many people can define net-zero, but everyone knows that they expect to get heating or cooling, lighting or connectivity when they flip a switch. We do need big-picture plans to deliver on that front-line promise.

But as long as the discussion stays at 30,000 feet—in the trade-offs between different energy corridors, or the important finer points of environmental assessment law—we’ll lose the essential connection to people in Etobicoke and Jasper, in Burnaby, British Columbia and Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, who take the hit when political leaders make the wrong choices on climate and energy.

Here are just a few of the questions we should have heard in the debate, and that all the leaders and their campaigns should have been able to answer:

• In the next grid outage, which party is promising the distributed energy system that will keep my insulin refrigerated and my loved one’s medical device running until the power comes back on? And who’s funding the community wraparounds that help those systems succeed?

• How does a national energy corridor (of either flavour) connect to or help reduce the risk of severe storms and flooding across the Greater Toronto Area, or Montreal, or Atlantic Canada, or Calgary, now and in the future?

• How will each party’s platform help Canada attract new business investment and create good, well-paid jobs by guaranteeing an affordable, reliable electricity supply? (Hint: Today’s vulnerable, glitchy grid isn’t always up to the task.)

• When will federal and provincial governments help transit agencies offer the high-frequency service that made Brampton, Ontario an unlikely success story, and stop blaming each other for the agencies’ chronic shortage of operating funds?

• And how many more neighbourhoods or towns must we burn to the ground—from Fort McMurray and Jasper to Lytton, B.C. and Enterprise, Northwest Territories—before we combine the right preventive measures with a serious, all-hands effort to get our climate pollution under control?

All of these questions point to climate change as the problem and the energy transition as at least a central part of the solution—as long as we get the transition right. They all fit well with top-line messages about economic security and national sovereignty. And they connect the dots while mostly avoiding the standard “c-words” like “climate”, “carbon”, and “crisis” that have been marginalized and vilified by decades of misinformation, brought to you by a fossil fuel industry that chose not to take action after correctly anticipating the climate crisis in the 1970s.

This kind of honest, grounded debate won’t magically show up in the next seven or eight days. After we see the election result April 29, there will be some listening and learning to do, whoever wins.

But whatever the result, we’ll all be better off with the kind of first principles we heard in Nepean today—applied first to Trump’s malignant threats, then to climate change and the energy transition. That’s a test that any national leader of any political stripe should be able to pass.

The post Opinion: Carney’s ‘Canada Strong’ rally taps into today’s existential crisis, sets the tone for the next one appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

There’s still a long way to go before the votes are counted in Canada’s April 28 federal election, longer still before we see whether the party platforms have any more substance than the mostly virtual paper they’re written on.

But if some of the campaign pledges and side conversations we’ve seen over the last week are still standing on the morning of April 29, we may be entering a period where endless, performative debate gives way to pragmatic action and getting stuff done. And just in time to help build a new “coalition of the willing”, an alliance of countries standing against Donald Trump’s moves to reshape the global economy in his own chaotic image.

It’s so easy and, let’s be honest, so tempting during an election campaign to react to every issue or policy statement through a partisan lens. But that’s a line that non-profits and charities are necessarily careful not to cross, and you won’t see Energy Mix Productions endorse any candidate or party in this or any other election.

That still leaves the door open for an essential conversation about the practical actions and real-world change we need over the next four years, and what the party platforms tell us about how they plan to respond.

The Answers You Should Want to Hear

Let’s start with some of the enduring questions and priorities that should be on all of our minds, whether or not there’s an election on:

• What are the most practical, achievable, affordable paths that can still transform Canada’s economy and energy systems and get us to zero emissions by 2050?

• How do we make sure that everything we do tackles multiple, interconnected crises at once, so that our actions on energy and climate change make day-to-day life safer, more affordable, and more fair and equitable for all?

• What are the common sense steps that will make a real difference in the manufactured global crisis brought to us by the rogue regime in the White House—to protect and strengthen Canadian sovereignty, restore international cooperation on issues from climate change to health to nature protection and more, and help lead the way to a new international trading bloc that leaves Donald Trump and his clown car full of henchfolk behind?

• How do we build on the moment of national unity Trump has handed us to restore trust and cohesion across the country and its regions? Not by ignoring or averaging out our differences of opinion and partisanship, but by finding the deeper values and priorities (like, y’know, not becoming a 51st state) that unite us?

With this line of questioning, we can assess the major candidates and their platforms based not on any prior party preference, but on the future they seem most likely to deliver if we give them the chance. For better and for worse, the Liberal and Conservative camps have made it pretty easy to compare and contrast—one of them by reading their lips, the other by trying to read their minds.

Read Their Lips

On the Conservative side, party leader Pierre Poilievre has done us all the great courtesy of eliminating all ambiguity about his proposed “Canada First” National Energy Corridor. On a campaign stop in St. John’s April 1, he fully endorsed a letter from 14 fossil fuel CEOs that demanded the next federal government declare a “Canadian energy crisis” and “use all its available emergency powers” to fast-track fossil fuel export projects while gutting federal regulation.

The Conservatives pledged to repeal the federal Impact Assessment Act and the West Coast tanker ban, set a six-month approval deadline for major megaprojects along a pre-approved fossil energy corridor, walk away from the federal emissions cap on oil and gas, and eliminate an industrial carbon tax that has been praised as one of the country’s most effective emission reduction measures.

With those words, Poilievre also eliminated any hope that the new export pipelines he’s promised will go into service until long after the Trump-induced trade crisis is over, and demand for oil and gas has gone into permanent decline. Savanna McGregor, Grand Chief of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council, warned that Poilievre’s promise to “pre-approve” projects along the corridor would “nearly paralyse” the work rather than speeding it up.

“Surely he knows Canada’s constitution requires Indigenous consultation, accommodation, and ultimately consent to build major infrastructure inside his National Energy Corridor?” she wrote for a Toronto Star. “How can there be consultation (to say nothing of accommodation and consent) if the corridor is ‘pre-approved’ before anyone has the blueprints for what infrastructure will be built and where?”

Moreover, Poilievre’s boldly performative (performatively bold?) promise assumes a level of commitment we haven’t seen from some of the companies that are backing these projects. Andrew Leach, a leading energy and environmental economist based at the University of Alberta, recently took a deep dive into the 10 projects the Conservative leader wants to fast-track—and identified the ones that stalled out when their proponents failed to submit their environmental assessment paperwork. After going into the detailed history on one of them, he asks:

So, tell me dear readers: how is a @PierrePoilievre government going to overcome this hurdle? How, in a year, are they going to approve a project that, for 8+ years, has refused to submit a single environmental assessment document and has officially withdrawn its project?

Even when the companies are doing their homework, a new network of oil and gas pipelines along a corridor no one has agreed to isn’t the policy we need or want. Not unless we’re happy to see Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions increase through 2035.

One of the enduring lessons of Donald Trump’s return to power is that when they tell us what they plan to do, what pain and damage and loss they plan to inflict, it’s a good idea to believe them. And Poilievre, to his credit, is leaving no doubt.

Read Their Minds

The assessment is actually a bit more complicated on the Liberal side. Not because party leader Mark Carney’s energy and electricity sovereignty plan doesn’t hit some badly-needed touchpoints, but because the devil is in the details. And the details are all about delivery, an area where his party hasn’t always excelled over the last decade.

In his announcement last Wednesday in Calgary, Carney cast an east-west electricity grid as a “nation-building project” to “secure Canadians’ access to affordable, reliable, clean, Canadian electricity”. He committed to investing in the country’s “conventional and clean energy potential”, touted a new First and Last Mile Fund to kick-start critical mineral projects and build the clean energy supply chain, and pledged to issue decisions on new megaprojects within two years.

The Liberal Party news release and backgrounder ran long on language about clean and community energy, short on references to fossil fuels, and contained not a single nod to pipelines. In Calgary, Carney told media Canada would “choose its partners carefully, and work with those who share our values,” iPolitics reported at the time.

“Ignoring climate change,” he added, is “not only morally wrong, but economically wrong.”

The balance of stated priorities in the Liberals’ policy pronouncement was something the energy and climate crowd could only have dreamed of 10 years ago. But the announcement still received an appropriately cautious response.

“We’re glad to see the Liberal Party highlighting that investing in clean electricity capacity is critical for our sovereignty and economy,” Climate Action Network Canada Executive Director Caroline Brouillette said in a release. But “conventional energy” is still “a euphemism for continuing the status quo approach of expanding fossil fuels,” which translates into “pipelines going across Indigenous lands, many billions sunk into stranded assets, and climate harm caused by increased emissions that will come back to hurt us in the form of floods and wildfires.”

Hey, Let’s Try an Industrial Strategy!

The good news is that this is an industrial strategy, not an energy strategy, which means it has a chance of pushing past the policy paralysis on climate by making emission reductions the “co-benefit” rather than the focal point.

But if the Liberals win government and get a shot at putting action behind their words, everything will depend on the way the plan is developed, pitched, and implemented to make sure the climate gains and associated community benefits they promise actually materialize. Some questions to watch out for:

• How will every project genuinely contribute to a sovereign Canada’s energy and economic security by making energy more affordable, supporting local economies and job creation, boosting climate resilience, and reducing the climate pollution that disrupts our communities with ever-intensifying climate disasters?

• What steps will Canada consistently take to reduce demand for energy and resources before figuring out how to supply the rest, and how will that work be funded?

• How will the government move past checkbox consultation to make sure critical mineral or other renewable resource megaprojects keep community goals front and centre—in Indigenous country, and everywhere else?

• What standards will Ottawa enforce through a fast-tracked, single-window review process to protect health and well-being, look out for local ecosystems, and ensure that real benefits flow to communities that are too often left behind when megaprojects come to town?

• And where will a new government come down on measures like Sen. Rosa Galvez’ proposed Climate-Aligned Finance Act, which died on the order paper in the last Parliament and must absolutely be reintroduced—and adopted—when the new term begins?

Pro tip: All of these priorities—all of them—trace back to a least-cost energy strategy that relies on energy efficiency, renewables, and energy storage, not fossil fuels.

The post Opinion: On climate and energy, Canada needs pragmatics, not performance pieces appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

Liberal leader Mark Carney is receiving limited praise for putting clean electricity at the centre of his plan to make Canada “the world’s leading energy superpower”, amid uncertainty about his simultaneous commitment to “conventional energy” and continuing concerns about red tape blocking local climate projects.

In a statement in Calgary Wednesday, Carney listed energy security, trade diversification, and long-term competitiveness as the three cornerstones of his party’s energy platform in the April 28 federal election. “Canada has a tremendous opportunity to be the world’s leading energy superpower, in both clean and conventional energy,” he said, while reducing climate pollution at the same time. “We can lead the energy transition while ensuring affordable energy at home and building the strongest economy in the G7.”

The statement called for Ottawa to “secure Canada’s energy and electricity sovereignty” by:

• “Working with provinces and territories to build out an East-West electricity grid, in a historic nation-building project, to secure Canadians’ access to affordable, reliable, clean, Canadian electricity”; while

• Investing in Canada’s “conventional and clean energy potential” to “reduce our reliance on the United States and build trading relationships with reliable partners.”

The announcement touted measures to:

• Support clean energy and critical mineral projects with a new First and Last Mile Fund meant to “kickstart the clean energy supply chain”;

• Fast-track clean energy projects of national interest, as identified by federal, provincial, and territorial governments and Indigenous peoples, with a single regulatory review process “that uphold environmental standards and Indigenous consultation”;

• Double the federal Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program to $10 billion;

• Continue the current government’s suite of clean energy tax credits and reinforce the Canada Growth Fund, “including by supporting carbon contracts for difference”;

• Establish a new major projects office at the federal level with a mandate to issue decisions within two years instead of five.

Choose Our Partners Carefully

Carney told media in Calgary the plan would call for Canada to “choose its partners carefully, and work with those who share our values,” iPolitics reports. “Ignoring climate change,” he said, is “not only morally wrong, but economically wrong.”

But “to build the strongest economy in the G7 we need to develop both clean energy and the lowest carbon conventional energy,” he added.

The Liberal Party news release and backgrounder [pdf] ran long on language about clean and community energy, short on support for fossil fuels, and contained not a single nod to pipelines. But the references to conventional energy still raised some consternation with climate hawks.

“We’re glad to see the Liberal Party highlighting that investing in clean electricity capacity is critical for our sovereignty and economy,” Climate Action Network Canada Executive Director Caroline Brouillette said in a release. “The sun and wind are free, abundant resources that Donald Trump cannot weaponize—so let’s make use of them and build out the supporting infrastructure for a national East-West electricity grid.”

However, ‘conventional energy’ is “a euphemism for continuing the status quo approach of expanding fossil fuels,” which means “pipelines going across Indigenous lands, many billions sunk into stranded assets, and climate harm caused by increased emissions that will come back to hurt us in the form of floods and wildfires,” she added. Carney and the Liberals “must be clear: fossil fuels are making us more vulnerable. Renewables are our path to security. An all-of-the-above approach simply does not work.”

Climate Red Tape

On the same day as Carney’s Calgary announcement, The Atmospheric Fund published a call to streamline the rules for getting local clean energy projects built. “While North American banks are busy cutting red tape for the fossil fuel industry, wouldn’t it be a better time to shine a light on regulations that are impeding business in the cleantech sector?” asked Evan Wiseman, TAF’s senior manager of climate policy.

“In this current, chaotic moment, cities, provinces, and the Canadian government are united in looking for ways to cost-effectively and quickly scale domestic and local economic development,” he added. “Regulators can unlock significant job growth and efficiency by removing barriers to clean energy technologies. Further, they can create jobs, build up local supply networks, and insulate our energy sector against international forces beyond our control.”

Wiseman said TAF began meeting with construction trades, manufacturers, and heat pump and solar installers before Trump launched his economic war on Canada (and most of the rest of the world). Those discussions explored the “rabbit hole” of red tape obstructing the clean energy transition.

“We identified municipal bylaws, provincial legislation, and utility processes that were created decades ago, long before heat pumps or [electric vehicles] were on the market. None of them were intentionally set to impede climate action—but all of them are now slowing it down.”

As examples, the post lists municipal zoning bylaws, Ontario’s wind power moratorium, and local utility rules that block rooftop solar—all of which would presumably warrant attention in tandem with a Carney-led bid to fast-track project approvals.

Winning the Carbon Tax Vote

Meanwhile, heads may have been turning (or worse) at Conservative Party of Canada headquarters after polling showed that Carney, not CPC leader Pierre Poilievre, is receiving voters’ thanks for eliminating the former Trudeau government’s controversial consumer carbon tax.

In new polling from Abacus Data, 55% of respondents “cited Carney as the leader who should get the credit for doing away with the price on carbon on April 1, compared to just 28% who said Poilievre brought about this goal by pushing for it,” veteran political columnist Susan Delacourt writes for the Toronto Star. “What this poll shows is that Carney is reaping much of the advantages of scrapping the levy, and far less blame for being associated with the government that introduced it.”

“This data will make some Conservatives’ heads explode,” Abacus CEO David Coletto told Delacourt.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail:

• Canadian scientists are sounding the alarm in a leading international journal after Poilievre promised to “end the imposition of woke ideology in the allocation of federal funds for university research” if he forms the next government. “I think this is the first time a politician in Canada has crossed that line to officially say they want to interfere to control research topics,” Madeleine Pastinelli, president of Quebec’s university professors’ union, told the journal Science. “It could be a very terrible time for us.”

Evidence for Democracy has launched a non-partisan Vote Science website “to try to put science, research, and evidence-informed decision-making at the centre of the campaign,” Science writes.

“If we look south of the border, we can see examples of how the ideological perspectives can become really perverse in different ways,” said E4D Executive Director Sarah Laframboise. “I think when we use this ambiguous language to shape scientific research it opens the door to ideological interference in what should be a rigorously independent system.”

• Policy Options is out with an analysis by Emma Starke, a senior research associate and PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, and Katya Rhodes, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, concluding that a Conservative government would likely increase Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“Our analysis of the party platforms for the April 28 election shows that GHG emissions would fall by 2035 under the Liberal approach—even with the removal of the unpopular but effective consumer carbon tax,” they write. “They would rise under the Conservative plan to axe existing performance regulations along with the carbon tax.”

The post Campaign trail: Carney earns praise for clean power plan as TAF spotlights ‘climate red tape’ appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Emma Starke, Katya Rhodes

Reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is not rocket science. Our policies need to make climate-related pollution more expensive via carbon pricing or more restrictive via performance regulations. Governments may also give tax breaks and grants to households and industries to foster low-GHG choices.

But climate-policy experts know from decades of evidence that without carbon pricing or regulations to decarbonize our energy system, population and economic growth will cause GHG emissions to rise.

Our analysis of the party platforms for the April 28 election shows that GHG emissions would fall by 2035 under the Liberal approach – even with the removal of the unpopular but effective consumer carbon tax. They would rise under the Conservative plan to axe existing performance regulations along with the carbon tax.

The Conservatives argue that investing in clean technologies – nuclear energy, hydroelectricity, tidal power and carbon capture, utilization and storage – and removing red tape around developing these options will reduce emissions, although they have not outlined the details of these promises.

However, experts have long known that energy-supply subsidy programs alone do not reduce emissions in the end-use sectors of industry, buildings, and transport.

In addition, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have announced details of the impact on emissions of any policies they might enact to combat U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, such as short- or medium-term expansion of oil and gas production or building new pipelines. Therefore, these have only a modest effect in our analysis.

Decarbonization does not happen overnight

Transforming the stock of electricity plants, vehicles, home heating and industries occurs only gradually as government policies induce lower-carbon choices when people and firms naturally replace aging equipment and vehicles.

Gradual adoption of low-emission technologies has enabled Canada’s emissions to flatten over the last 20 years despite a 25-per-cent increase in the country’s population. But that general trend masks a few key developments.

One big source of emission reductions was the closure of all coal-fired power plants in Ontario from 2005-15, followed by the closure of coal plants in Alberta. Offsetting those, however, has been the steady growth of emissions from transportation, as well as from the oil and gas sector.

Since 2015, the carbon pricing and performance regulations implemented by the Trudeau Liberal government in sectors such as industry, electricity and transportation have started to significantly reduce per-capita GHG emissions.

Mark Carney has given us a sensible next step after the carbon tax. We need to take it.

From 2019: Emissions will rise under Conservative climate plan

What should be in a plain-speaking Conservative climate plan

Before we “axe the tax,” a quick lesson in history and physics

Independent analysis shows future Canadian emissions falling, even with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s elimination of the consumer carbon tax.

These federal policies are key to ensuring that the national decarbonization effort is cost-effective and co-ordinated. Yet, the Conservatives led by Piere Poilievre promise to remove all or most of them if they form the next government.

The differences in the approach of the two main federal political parties are significant.

(We focused our limited time for this analysis on the two parties that pollsters suggest have the greatest chance of forming a government after the election. In addition, we use identical forecasts from Statistics Canada for population and GDP growth – the “medium growth scenario” – for both parties. We also note that our 2030 forecast is similar to analyses from the Canadian Climate Institute.)

Forecasting Canada’s GHG emissions under Liberal policies

Several independent energy-economy modelling teams have produced estimates of the effect to 2030 and beyond of current federal Liberal policies. The Canadian Climate Institute assessed these studies and provided an estimate of their impact to 2030.

We have produced a similar estimate, with one caveat. We do not analyze the effect of various subsidies such as tax credits and grants because all political parties promise these and they have only a marginal effect on GHG emissions. We focus instead on the key regulatory and pricing policies because these are the most important for reducing GHG emissions. These include:

• The industrial output-based pricing system to reduce the intensity of industrial carbon emissions;
• regulations to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas production;
• clean-fuel regulations requiring declining intensity of emissions from carbons in fuel;
• the electric-vehicle availability standard requiring increased sales of zero-emission vehicles;
• clean-electricity regulations requiring declining intensity of emissions from the production of electricity.

For our simulation of these policies, we used the CIMS energy-economy model, which has for decades analyzed GHG policies at the behest of leaders across the political spectrum. Because it takes years for policies to influence GHG trajectories, we ran the CIMS model to 2035.

Canadian GHG emissions are expected to be approximately 680 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025. Our simulation shows that Liberal policies would reduce this to about 600 megatonnes by 2035 especially if the Liberals strengthen their industrial output-based pricing system as the Canadian Climate Institute has proposed.

Thus, while our forecast suggests the Liberals are not on a trajectory to achieve their national 2030 GHG target of a 40- to 45-per-cent reduction below 2005 levels, their policies would at least drive significant emission reductions by 2035.

While most economists would prefer Canada to retain the carbon tax because this is likely the most economically efficient policy, it is still possible to significantly reduce GHG emissions thanks to the Liberals’ remaining regulatory policies.

Forecasting GHG emissions under promised Conservative policies

The federal Conservatives have promised for years to remove the consumer carbon tax. But given Carney’s move to kill it, it is no longer a factor in our simulations of both Liberal and Conservative climate approaches.

However, the Conservatives have promised to also remove key existing Liberal regulatory policies that would drive decarbonization in the absence of a consumer carbon tax.

Specifically, Poilievre has committed to removing the output-based pricing system, the clean fuel regulations, the electric-vehicle availability standard and the clean-electricity regulations. The potential emissions-reduction contribution of these regulations grows in importance in the absence of the consumer carbon tax.

Figure 1 shows our forecast that emissions would increase to approximately 720 megatonnes in 2035 from 680 megatonnes in 2025 if the Conservatives remove these policies and don’t replace them with something else.

Specifically, without the emission-reducing pressure of the output-based pricing system, emissions from industry and oil and gas production would grow by about 40 megatonnes relative to today.

Emissions from transportation would be higher with the elimination of the electric-vehicle availability standard and the clean-fuel regulations. Removal of these would also slow the adoption of zero-emission personal vehicles, except in B.C. and Quebec, which have their own provincial programs.

The elimination of the clean-fuel regulations would slow the adoption of biodiesel, hydrogen and other low-emission options in trucking, rail, shipping and air transportation.

By contrast, electricity emissions would not be significantly different under the existing Liberal government policies or the Conservative promises because the current version of the clean-electricity regulations has minimal effect during the 2025-35 period.

When governments first attempted GHG policies in the 1990s, they avoided carbon pricing and regulatory policies in the hope that encouraging voluntary actions, combined with incentives for technology innovation and early adoption, would be enough to reduce GHG emissions.

Considerable evidence has refuted this assumption. Yet the federal Conservatives under Poilievre still suggest that removing carbon pricing and key regulations will not lead to rising GHG emissions, even as populations and economies grow. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The authors thank Brad Griffin and Mark Jaccard for reviewer comments but the authors are solely responsible for all assumptions and analysis. Details on assumptions, data inputs, model methodology and modelling results are available on request.

The post Opinion: GHG emissions likely to rise if Conservatives win April 28 election appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

With Donald Trump’s preposterously-named “Liberation Day” tariffs set to take effect this Wednesday, April 2—and Politico reporting that no one in the White House has a clue what form the final announcement will take—we’re updating and republishing a February 23 post on the new international trading system that countries outside the U.S. are scrambling to build.

If that system is guided by a tough carbon standard that drives down emissions while speeding up the shift to a green economy, it could be a powerful win for all the countries that take part. And Canada, at least for the moment, is emerging as one of the leaders of the pack.

It’s just a possible pathway, not a prediction. But if you take some of the elements of our current geopolitical moment and stack the building blocks just right, you can imagine Donald Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs shocking Canada into the diversified trading relationships it needs—with emission reductions receiving top billing.

If it works, it will be because a tough, meaningful standard for low-carbon exports becomes the trump card (lower-case ‘t’, please) in the economic warfare the rogue regime in Washington, DC has brought to our doorstep.

The win would require some big choices—bolstering a recently mostly performative set of national climate policies with serious, consistent curbs on emissions, and quickly relinquishing our status as one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters—all of that as cleaner, greener economic relationships flourish. But that’s no more and no less than the pivot that many of us have been working for for years and decades, supported by clean energy and industrial alternatives that are practical, affordable, and ready to scale up.

Most important, it responds to the continuous flow of alarming news of record temperature rise, ocean warming, and ice loss, devastating and deadly wildfires, crippling drought, rising climate pollution, and “planetary solvency” risks, all evidence of a global climate emergency running out of control.

But how sweet would it be if we could look back in five, 10, or 15 years and realize that the unremitting, deliberately-choreographed avalanche of horrors that we’ve all witnessed over the past two months became the final catalyst for countries to get their act together on an even bigger crisis?

Read Where the Trade Winds Are Blowing

The international trading system is hideously complex, and it isn’t an area where I can claim any specific expertise. But particularly in light of Trump’s ceaseless attempts to bully other countries and bend them to his narcissistic will, here are a couple of basic truths to keep in mind:

You can only sell a product, service, or concept that someone is willing to buy.

And being relentlessly unpleasant or, in Trump’s case, actively hostile isn’t the best way to build a positive, long-term partnership.

In fact, the outpouring of reaction to his mutterings about Canada as a 51st state show how quickly a decades-long relationship can be irretrievably broken.

So is there a market for global trade that puts clean, climate-friendly products at the centre and gradually turns away from the oil and gas exports at the frozen heart of Trump’s malign agenda?

Veteran climate analyst Dan Woynillowicz, principal of Polaris Strategy + Insight in Victoria, B.C., pulled together some of the numbers in a LinkedIn post last month. He pointed out that:

• 107 countries representing 82.2 per cent of global emissions had communicated some form of net-zero target as of January 2024, according to the Climate Watch Net-Zero Tracker. Some 29 of them, including Canada, had enshrined those targets in law, while another 60 had published them in policy documents.

• Of immediate significance for Canada, “states representing two-thirds of American GDP have emission reduction targets,” Woynillowicz wrote, and seven of them are among the top 10 import markets for Canadian products.

• After the U.S., “it’s notable that the next 10 top Canadian export destinations also have net zero commitments.”

We know that there’s often an excruciatingly long distance between climate pledges and real climate action. But outside Trump’s bubble of delusion and mob boss intimidation, there are indications every day that governments and financiers largely understand the cascading, global climate emergency that is upon us. Increasingly, they get it that nothing else will matter if they don’t respond. Even if, with some courageous exceptions, they can’t bring themselves to say it out loud right now.

As one example of what U.S. states will be up to in the age of Trump 2.0, Canary Media reports that nine of them—including the one that styles itself the world’s fifth-biggest economy—“have enacted Buy Clean laws to boost demand for lower-carbon steel, concrete, asphalt, glass, and other industrial products.” California got the ball rolling in 2017. Oregon, Colorado, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts have since followed suit. And “agencies in other states are starting to adopt similar strategies, including by collecting emissions data about products used in public works projects.”

With sensible thinking like that, maybe these are the top candidates for Canada’s next nine provinces or territories? (Can we please add Vermont, just out of personal preference?)

All of which is a longabouts way of saying that the markets where we already have trading relationships are demanding the low-carbon products and services that we should already want to send them—however much Trump might huff and puff. (Much as we might regret growing up with the image of a big, bad wolf…if the one in the White House tries to blow down a net-zero building made of low-carbon concrete or mass timber, or the solar microgrid that powers it, how do you really think that’s going to end for him? We’ll bring the popcorn.)

Looking Beyond Our Shores

The European Union adopted the world’s first carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) in 2023, and its implementation is set to begin this year. So it’s surely no mistake that Liberal leader Mark Carney has talked about replacing the hated consumer carbon tax by introducing a CBAM regime with other like-minded countries if he forms a government after Canada’s April 28 election.

That thinking leads toward a plausible and really promising future where climate impact is a key criterion guiding trading relationships, as long as the system is rigorous enough to deliver real-world results. If a country is seriously and measurably reducing emissions, it qualifies. If it isn’t, it gets politely but firmly left behind. One of the important caveats on CBAMs is that they risk disadvantaging developing countries that have done the least to pour climate-warming gases into the atmosphere, but lack the investment dollars to decarbonize their economies. The EU is looking into that problem [pdf], but maintains so far that “given the nature of the goods under the current scope of CBAM, developing countries and [least-developed countries] are not the most affected.”

As multiple commentators have pointed out, trade and business relationships can’t be reset overnight. But a crisis is a time when things move faster and change more profoundly because they have to, and the David Suzuki Foundation has a good summary of the problems with today’s trading system and the solutions that are already emerging.

We can love it or hate it that Trump is blowing up the old “normal”—whether that’s the massive, preferential access the U.S. has enjoyed to Canadian resources, or Canada’s corresponding dependence on oil and gas export revenue. But whether you think of that place as comfort or paralysis, there’s no going back. Which opens up what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decide what we want to do next.

The World Is Moving On

During a period when four out of five countries around the world saw trade increase as a share of their GDP—with gains of at least 10 per cent in more than a dozen jurisdictions—the U.S. share has “declined significantly”, according to Rockefeller International Chair Ruchir Sharma.

That trend is most definitely paralleled by an emerging, global shift in energy priorities. “Most major economies are investing in ever-cheaper solar and wind power,” the New York Times wrote. “Even as coal, oil, and gas still power the global economy, and more fossil fuels are burned year after year, the movement globally is toward heavy investment in solar, wind, and batteries, the prices of which have fallen sharply in recent years.”

Now, Trump’s obsession with tariffs and his boundless hostility toward China are prompting Asian countries to reorder their trading relationships to reduce their immediate vulnerability. “The result could be a domino effect of protectionism, with countries turning inward and raising tariffs in response to American trade barriers,” the Times reported last week.

“There is a risk that the U.S. really overplays its leverage,” said Simon Evenett, a professor at IMD Business School in Switzerland. “The U.S. market is still the biggest in the world, but proportionally it is lower than it was 20 years ago.”

Or, as Social Capital Partners Chair Jon Shell wrote on LinkedIn this week:

The EU, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia (I’m now calling them “EU + 5”) collectively have 760 million people and control 34 per cent of the global economy and vast quantities of natural resources….

The best way to beat a bully is for the rest of the group to rise up against him.

The Reality Outside Trump’s Bubble

In the wider world, reality is beginning to bite.

Trump’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” obsession is still running headlong into a global natural gas glut that will hit in the next couple of years and drive down profits for producers that are already borrowing billions of dollars to mollify skeptical investors.

Europe is still working to reduce its dependency on liquefied natural gas (LNG) from all sources, after Russia’s war in Ukraine drove home the message that the continent must never again be dependent on imported energy from anywhere, however friendly or accommodating a supplier might seem. (Trump’s hostility must surely have reinforced that learning.) Europe’s LNG imports fell 19 per cent last year, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reported last month, with demand hitting an 11-year low, and U.S. imports declined 18 per cent.

In Canada, with the cards increasingly stacked against Trump, we get to decide which side we’re on. Just hours after the Canadian team “annexed” the 4 Nations championship in last month’s tournament, it was mandatory for that observation to lead back to another round of sports chatter.

“Just going to state this matter-of-factly,” The Sports Network’s Dave Naylor wrote on social media. “The honourary [sic] captain for Canada in this game publicly supports a political leader whose position is that Canada should not exist as a nation.”

But what if the hero for the moment is a former Harvard University hockey goalie, now donning a business suit to play on a vastly bigger rink—not because of the partisan stripe he’s adopting, but because of the depth of climate, trade, and central banking expertise he brings to the job?

Once more with feeling—none of this will be easy, and none of it is yet certain. But if we hold a trump card, it’s time to play it. And if an understanding of climate change and the benefits of low-carbon trade is our competitive advantage over the convicted felon (etc. etc.) now occupying the Oval Office…well, we know the assignment.

The post Opinion: Low-carbon trade is Canada’s trump card over Trump appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s position on the federal oil and gas emissions cap and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s take on U.S. interference in Canadian politics took centre stage in the hours and days after Carney initiated a long-anticipated federal election for April 28.

Meanwhile, Carney’s past work as a central banker and climate finance champion, along with his early campaign positioning against Donald Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, have made him a bit of an international heavy hitter for media in other countries that are suddenly paying attention to a Canadian election campaign.

Early Attention to Emissions Cap

The emissions cap emerged as an early campaign issue, even after the former minority government of Justin Trudeau delayed its enforcement until 2030-2032 after introducing detailed regulations two years behind schedule. “Leaving compliance until 2030 is like waiting until the second period of a hockey game to start keeping score,” Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac), said at the time.

Carney himself created uncertainty about whether he would maintain the cap. After a contentious meeting with Smith in Edmonton March 20, he said he wanted to build competitiveness in the country’s energy sector by “working with industry and with provinces on specific ways to get those reductions… as opposed to having preset caps or preset restrictions on preset timelines.”

Those remarks raised questions after newly-appointed Environment and Climate Change Minister Terry Duguid said the cap would be safe under a Carney government. “We want that energy. What we don’t want is that pollution,” he told The Canadian Press.

A day later, Carney clarified that he would stand behind an “emissions cap, not a production cap,” while speeding up federal technology investments to help bring down oil and gas sector emissions, CP reported.

“Investment in carbon capture and storage technology, investment in reducing methane,” he told media. “The regulation or a law doesn’t reduce emissions,” so “what I’m focused on is action in order to reduce those emissions. That requires partnerships, it requires a different framework,” a topic that he said was on the table when he met with provincial and territorial premiers last week.

But it may take more than new partnerships to advance carbon capture and storage (CCS) in time to make a significant dent in Canada’s fossil fuel emissions. In October 2023, the Regina-based International CCS Knowledge Centre admitted the technology won’t be ready in time to meet 2035 decarbonization targets, after 10 of the world’s 13 “flagship” CCS projects had failed to deliver. While oil sands producers were initially looking for C$50 billion in taxpayer subsidies to decarbonize their operations, then-environment minister Steven Guilbeault made it clear they would receive no more federal funds beyond the $7 billion in then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s 2022 budget.

Since then, the six oil sands companies that make up the Pathways Alliance have steadfastly refused to make a final investment decision for their proposed $16.5-billion carbon capture hub without further subsidies—or as they prefer to call it, greater “certainty” or “clarity”—to transfer more of the project cost to taxpayers. With Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson urging Pathways to “fish or cut bait”, Globe columnist Adam Radwanski suggested last week that the companies are losing interest in the controversial megaproject, given its reliance on a technology that “has high operational costs once installed, without on its own generating any revenues.”

Following last week’s first ministers’ meeting, Carney also declined to rule out federal funding for future oil and gas pipelines, the Globe and Mail reported. “The vast, vast, vast majority of investment dollars and risk is going to be borne by the private sector—and rewards, of course, by the private sector—but I’m not going to rule out any federal participation in any possibility down the road,” he said.

‘Offensive and False’

With national sovereignty and Trump’s economic war on Canada shaping up as the vote-determining issue in the election, Smith has been on the defensive this week, after telling an alt-right website in the United States that Trump’s “unjust and unfair tariffs” had given the Liberals a boost in the polls.

The interview with Breitbart took place March 8, before Carney won the Liberal leadership or the election was called. Smith press secretary Sam Blackett declared it “offensive and false” to suggest his boss was inviting Trump to tilt the campaign, and on Monday, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault said Smith’s comments didn’t fit the definition of “undue influence” by foreign entities under the Canada Elections Act.

But Lisa Young, a University of Calgary professor of political science, said the remarks could still create problems for Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Smith “really hasn’t done Poilievre and the Conservatives any favours here. There’s a quote about him being more favourable to working with the United States, that I think is likely to end up on a Liberal campaign ad at some point,” she told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener show Monday.

The comments did “sound like inviting a foreign country to get involved,” she added, and while “it certainly isn’t illegal, I think the question is whether it’s appropriate for a provincial premier to be doing this.”

At least two columnists had a tougher take on Smith’s remarks. In the Toronto Star, Bruce Arthur opened with a long excerpt from the Breitbart interview, based on news reporting a day earlier by veteran political journalist Stephen Maher.

“What I fear is that the longer this dispute goes on, politicians posture, and it seems to be benefiting the Liberals right now,” said Smith. “So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I’ve told the administration officials, let’s just put things on pause so we can get through an election.

“If we do have Pierre (Poilievre) as our prime minister, then I think there’s a number of things we can do together. Pierre believes in development, he believes in low-cost energy, he believes in low taxes. He doesn’t believe in any of the woke stuff that’s taken over our politics over the last five years.

“So I would think there’s probably still always going to be areas that are skirmishes or disputes about particular industries, when it comes to the border, but I would say, on balance, that the perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with where the new direction in America, and I think we have a really great relationship for the period of time (that) they’re both in.”

On a campaign stop in Brampton, Ontario Monday, Poilievre was asked whether Smith’s remarks were appropriate. “People are free to make their own comments. I speak for myself,” he responded.

Aligned with an Enemy

The Star’s Bruce Arthur was rather more critical of Smith’s pitch.

“Let’s state this plainly: a sitting Canadian premier says she asked our enemy—and there is no question, at this point, that America under the Trump administration is an enemy of a free and sovereign Canada—to alter policy in order to help elect a federal candidate who is better aligned with that enemy of the country. She didn’t even ask that the tariffs be removed, just paused,” Arthur opined. “It is the kind of astonishing carelessness of total political warfare with a resistance to reality. And the mistake would be to write it off as simple politics.”

In the Globe, columnist Gary Mason took a different tack.

“Now, I don’t know about you, but that looks like a Canadian premier asking a foreign government to do something to alter the outcome of an election campaign in order to help the party and the federal leader she supports,” Mason wrote Monday. “Consider this hypothetical: If a provincial premier met with officials of the Communist Party of China, which was in the process of trying to destroy this country with brutal tariffs, and asked them to halt those economic threats until after a federal election campaign was over in order to better guarantee the result the premier was hoping for, there would be national outrage.”

Smith’s press secretary might well object, Mason added, but “people aren’t stupid and they can add things up for themselves. Her words are her words and she can’t now take them back.”

In a mid-month opinion piece for The Hill Times, Greenpeace Canada Senior Energy Strategist Keith Stewart warned against letting “Maple MAGAs” gut the country’s environmental protections and line up new subsidies for the fossil industry.

“To protect the people and places that we love, we can’t allow American President Donald Trump’s bullying to set the political agenda here in Canada,” he wrote. “Instead, we should build the green homes, power grid, and transportation systems that Trump so despises.”

Undeterred, Smith is still planning to attend a U.S. fundraiser Thursday with far right media provocateur Ben Shapiro, who’s been heard to call Canada a “silly country”, despite continuing calls from Opposition NDP MLAs to abandon the trip, The Canadian Press reports.

International Heavy Hitter

Meanwhile, the party leader who has been recording campaign videos with the actor who played an “international man of mystery” is getting some international attention of his own. News organizations are looking back at Carney’s past crisis management as a central banker and UN special envoy for climate finance, while focusing forward on his stance against Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats.

“Carney’s allure helped boost awareness around the financial risks of climate change,” writes the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), in a post that declares him a “green finance guru”. In his past efforts, “he called for fossil fuels to be kept in the ground lest they become worthless in a low-carbon world; he rallied international banks to make green pledges and avoid investments that could become ‘stranded assets’ with little value.”

Those positions are “commendably grounded in science but carry radical political implications,” Covering Climate Now co-founder and executive director Mark Hertsgaard wrote earlier this month for The Nation.

With much of that momentum now unravelling, “Carney’s appointment to the world leadership stage does offer some hope for the reinvigoration of green finance,” BIJ writes. “But if he remains in his position beyond an impending general election, he’ll face major political obstacles in any drive for a greener economy—both at home and abroad.” The post summarizes the resistance Carney is already encountering from Smith and others, the threats from Trump, and the results of his overseas trip to the United Kingdom and Europe in the days after he was sworn in as prime minister.

In the U.S., at least one political analyst is crediting Carney with showing some spine in response to Trump’s bullying, in contrast to congressional Democrats, an Ivy League university, and a prestigious law firm that “folded like lawn chairs under pressure from Donald Trump.” Against that backdrop, “if you want to know what it looks like to fight back, cast your gaze north of the border,” writes veteran political analyst Taegan Goddard on his Political Wire blog.

“The former Bank of Canada governor—and now new prime minister—took a bold gamble: He made resisting Trump central to his campaign. Framing the upcoming Canadian election not just as a national choice but as a bulwark against Trump’s calls to annex his country, Carney flipped the script,” Goddard says.

“The contrast with recent events in the U.S. couldn’t be more stark,” he adds. “While powerful institutions here appear unwilling—or unable—to stand up to Trump, Canada’s new leader is gaining ground by doing exactly that.” With opinion polls trending in Carney’s direction, “It’s a reminder that, sometimes, the way to beat a bully is to stand your ground. And voters might just reward you for it.”

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By Christopher Bonasia

Promising to roll back carbon pricing is emerging as one of the surest ways to accumulate votes as Canada’s political parties prepare for a federal election next year, according to new public opinion data released Sunday.

Polling by Abacus Data found that 37 per cent of respondents would definitely back a party that wanted to eliminate the federal carbon tax and another 28 per cent might do so, while only about one in five said they would never support the idea.

The issue was one of four that Abacus identified as a vote winner for any party that espoused it, along with increasing income taxes on the richest 1 per cent of Canadians (46 per cent definite/32 per cent possible), making public transit free in every Canadian city (40 per cent definite/31 per cent possible), and forcing religious organizations to pay taxes (34 per cent definite/29 per cent possible).

“This data confirms that eliminating the carbon tax has become a vote winner for the Conservatives and a real liability for the Liberals,” Abacus says.

Conservatives “overwhelmingly love” the idea of abolishing the carbon tax, the poll showed. Liberal and Bloc Québécois supporters are likely to oppose it, though with some disagreement, while New Democratic Party supporters “are the most divided—27 per cent say they would never vote for a party that promised to eliminate the carbon tax while 25 per cent say they definitely would vote for such a party,” the polling report states.

The Liberals maintain that better communication and public awareness will increase the carbon price’s popularity, and the party has tried to remind voters that the vast majority of households benefit from a carbon tax through rebates. Amid low poll numbers and with the election coming up, the current government is committed to moving forward without further exemptions since pausing it for home heating oil in the Atlantic provinces.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau trails behind Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose “Axe the Tax” campaign has gained momentum and won him points at the polls.

The controversy prompted Corporate Knights Research Director Ralph Torrie to call for a “grown-up conversation” about how to address the climate emergency without having a “shouting match” over carbon pricing. “The last thing the country needs is a ‘take no prisoners’ battle to the death over the carbon tax that could set back what climate progress has been made,” he wrote earlier this year.

Perceptions Skewed in the U.S.

Across the border in the United States, a skewed perception of public support for climate action is steering lawmakers away from implementing policies to address climate change, Grist reports.

Local officials especially continue to misinterpret public support for fossil fuels, even though three-quarters of Americans favour regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, according to polling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Academics have studied specific cases of this disconnect. In a recent article in the journal Nature Energy, researchers wrote that locally elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated their constituents’ support for large solar projects. Another study by Cambridge University found that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of restricting carbon emissions in their local districts.

The misperception is partly due to a psychological bias, says Grist. But more deliberate, intentional actions by corporations are also at work to present a false narrative, with some going so far as to hire actors to indicate support for fossil fuel projects and oppose renewables at public meetings.

“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but it’s what decision-makers think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants.”

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Most voters want climate policies that go beyond what was achieved in the last Parliament, according to a massive national survey conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights on behalf of Clean Energy Canada.

Merran Smith, Executive Director, Clean Energy Canada said “Canadians have sent a clear message: anyone who wants to be prime minister must provide a meaningful plan to address climate change.”  She added “Climate ambition is not only the right thing to do—going forward, it will also be a prerequisite for any party seeking power.”

Given the increased prominence of climate change during this federal election, a large-scale survey of more than 5,000 voters was conducted to collect data about how the issue affected voters’ choices and what they expect from the new minority government.

Most voters want bolder climate policies

During the campaign, the Liberals promised to introduce a number of new climate change measures, including legally binding targets that get Canada to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Two-thirds (67 per cent) of Canadian voters want the new Liberal government to either “enact the climate change policies they campaigned on” (37 per cent) or to “enact stronger climate change policies than they campaigned on—to do more at a faster pace on this issue” (30 per cent).

The desire for stronger action is popular across party lines. Even one-third (33 per cent) of Liberal voters want stronger climate policies than what was in the party’s platform, and majorities of Bloc (51 per cent), Green (64 per cent) or NDP (49 per cent) voters share this sentiment.

“This election produced a minority Parliament, but it’s a majority when it comes to the issue of climate change,” said Craig Worden, President, Pollara Strategic Insights.  “Canadians who voted Liberal, New Democrat, Bloc and Green want to see the government put a high priority on taking strong action to fight climate change in the current term.”

The Conservative climate plan failed to connect with most voters

In June, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer unveiled his party’s climate change and environment platform. It received significant media coverage and commentary, and 69 per cent of voters report being somewhat or very familiar with his plan.

It also had the most negative and sharply divided evaluations of all the major parties’ climate plans: half (50 per cent) of voters said the plan aimed “to do too little, too slowly.” Among Conservative voters, 69 per cent thought the party’s climate plan was “about right.” However, it was seen as doing too little by large majorities of Liberal (73 per cent), NDP (74 per cent), Green (78 per cent) and Bloc (63 per cent) voters.

Securing support in a minority Parliament

The survey asked voters if they supported or opposed the Liberal government adopting certain policies in return for other parties supporting and voting with them in a minority Parliament.

There is majority support nationally for five different proposals that have been discussed publicly by the NDP, the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois. The most popular proposal was “undertaking a large-scale jobs program that invests in clean energy and green infrastructure,” which is supported by 78 per cent of voters, with only 15 per cent opposed.

Support for all of these policies is higher among Liberal, NDP, Green and BQ voters. A majority of voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan supported the jobs program, but were opposed to the other proposals.

Climate change mattered for voters who didn’t choose Scheer

The survey asked voters to rate 41 different issues—ranging from health care and the economy to SNC-Lavalin and abortion rights—in terms of the influence each had on their ballot decision.

Each issue was rated on a 10-point scale, where 10 represented a major influence and 0 represented no influence at all. A majority (52 per cent) of Canadians indicated that climate change had an important influence on their decision by assigning it a rating of 7 to 10, ranking it 8th overall.

The data shows that climate change was particularly important for the voters who didn’t choose Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party. It was one of the five most important issues identified by Liberal (66 per cent), NDP (68 per cent), Green (82 per cent) and Bloc (62 per cent) voters.

Climate was the only top-five issue common to voters for all of those parties, but it was not influential for many Conservative voters (25 per cent).

On behalf of Clean Energy Canada, Pollara Strategic Insights conducted an online survey among a randomly-selected, reliable sample of 5,002 adult Canadians who reported voting in the 2019 federal election. The survey of voters was conducted from October 23- 25, 2019. A margin of error cannot be applied to online samples. A probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +1.4%, 19 times out of 20. Quotas and statistical weighting were applied to ensure the sample accurately represents the actual voting electorate in the 2019 federal election, based upon Elections Canada statistics, in terms of the provincial distribution of voters and the provincial and national distribution of political party support.

RESOURCES

Report | Exit Poll: Climate Change in the 2019 Canadian Federal Election

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