Rather than blaming Prime Minister Mark Carney for backsliding on climate change, why don't the Liberals simply admit their policies under former prime minister Justin Trudeau were misguided, ineffective and ruinously expensive for Canadian taxpayers?
Of course the question answers itself because Liberals never admit they're wrong.
Even when their current leader, the world's leading corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes before he became prime minister, acknowledged after becoming PM that under Trudeau's now-abandoned plan, the Liberals were "not going to reach our 2030 and 2035 climate targets." Why? Because, Carney said, it had "too much regulation … not enough action."
As for the cost to taxpayers of Trudeau's climate change policies, former environment minister Steven Guilbeault put it at "north of $200 billion" in April 2023. Heaven only knows what it's up to by now. That was at the same time Guilbeault was ludicrously insisting Canada was on track to achieve Trudeau's climate targets, even though every independent, credible, real-time assessment of Trudeau's climate policy, for example by the federal environment commissioner, said the Liberals were nowhere near doing what they said they would do.
Guilbeault, who will resign as an MP later this month, plus 13 anonymous Liberal MPs who aren't resigning, plus two senior members of a federal advisory board on achieving net zero emissions who quit, have all accused Carney of backsliding on climate change. Meanwhile, Carney's environment minister, Julie Dabrusin, insists the Liberals are committed to achieving Trudeau's goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Of course, a prediction of what may happen 24 years from now isn't worth anything in the real world.
Carney himself said last year on Nov. 17 in the House of Commons, in response to a question from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, while he was looking for support for his first budget, because a defeat would have brought down the government: "I can confirm to this House that we will respect our Paris commitments for climate change, and we're determined to achieve them." Under the United Nations Paris agreement, Trudeau committed Canada to what's called a "nationally determined contribution" of reducing Canada's emissions to 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, 45% to 50% by 2035 and to net zero by 2050.
Carney has yet to explain how Canada will achieve these emissions cuts, given that he says Canada wasn't on track to achieve them during the Trudeau government of 2015-25. The root problem in all this is that we've never had an adult discussion in Canada on climate policy. On how or why a huge, cold, northern, resource-based country with a relatively small population, responsible for a materially insignificant 1.5% of global emissions, should voluntarily hand over control of its energy policy, at enormous public expense, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Instead, we've had years of nonsensical rhetoric in Parliament from Liberals and others about how the age of fossil fuels is dead — even as the global use of fossil fuels continued to rise. We had a magical consumer carbon tax where rebates for most surpassed payments — except the government failed to factor in, as the Parliamentary Budget Office documented, its negative impact on the economy — and which became so unpopular with the public that Carney scrapped it upon becoming prime minister.
What taxpayers should really be hoping for is that Carney's "backsliding" on climate issues is sincere, because it's the only policy that makes sense for taxpayers.
