Is climate still a blind spot for Liberals?
Mark Carney speaks during his Liberal leader campaign launch in Edmonton, on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. / THE CANADIAN PRESS, Jason Franson
What makes for a good Liberal leader? Someone who wins elections.
That was former Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s response when asked at a 2006 party convention what the defining quality of a successful Liberal leader was. A three-time election winner, Chretien knew what he was talking about. But his answer turned out to be an ominous warning for Stephane Dion, whom the party selected as its new leader at that convention in Montreal. Dion failed to meet the benchmark. So did his immediate successor, Michael Ignatieff.
The Liberals’ eventual choice in 2013, Justin Trudeau, delivered three straight election victories in 2015, 2019, and 2021, securing his place as a Liberal success story. The fact that he failed to win a plurality of votes in the last two elections doesn’t diminish that reality. If anything, under Chrétien’s “whatever it takes” standard, it only reinforces it.
The Liberals’ ability to reinvent themselves in response to shifting public opinion has been a defining trait of their electoral dominance. And once again, we are witnessing—dramatically—one of these episodic transformations. Rare enough to be fascinating to watch, yet familiar.
The spectacle is particularly jarring on climate policy, where the once-untouchable consumer carbon price—long the centrepiece of the Liberal climate strategy—is now being abandoned by both leading contenders to replace Trudeau: Mark Carney, the former central banker turned finance executive, and Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s former deputy.
Both would scrap the consumer tax and shift the burden onto industrial emitters instead. But do these changes amount to a real transformation in climate policy? And more importantly, will Canadians buy it?
The answer depends on whether the Liberals have truly understood why Plan A failed in the first place.
Again with the lying
Liberals abandoning the carbon tax have justified the move not as an admission that the policy itself was flawed, but as a casualty of misinformation. As Carney put it: the tax remains sound in principle, but has been rendered politically toxic due to “misinformation and lies, quite frankly, by the leader of the Opposition.”
However, Carney’s alternative—hiking taxes on large emitters and implementing carbon tariffs—rests on the same fundamental assumption: that Canadians remain open to solving climate change through taxation, as long as they themselves don’t have to pay directly. And second, the equally flawed belief that the government can engineer a climate transition without imposing meaningful economic costs.
Or as Carney framed it: “When Pierre Poilievre says we have to choose between fighting climate change and growing our economy, he’s lying to us.” (Again with the lying.)
The Globe and Mail published an editorial this week challenging the “free lunch” aspect of Carney’s plan—effectively flipping the question of who might actually be misleading Canadians. It’s worth a read. But I’ll add a few thoughts of my own.
While Poilievre’s rhetoric on “job-killing” carbon pricing has certainly contributed to public opposition, there are more fundamental reasons why the policy never took hold—reasons the Liberals should pay close attention to as they attempt to reposition themselves.
1) Affordability
The consumer carbon tax increased costs across an economy already struggling with affordability and competitiveness. Carney’s proposal would achieve the same outcome, just through different means—by driving up the cost of goods and services like gasoline, heating fuel, and groceries through indirect taxation on producers.
2) Uneven impact
Carbon pricing disproportionately affects provinces with high fossil fuel reliance, like Alberta and Saskatchewan. It also exacerbates the rural-urban divide, whether it’s a consumer carbon tax or a levy on large emitters. This is because the country’s largest emitters - oil and gas, mining, electricity generation, agriculture - are more likely to be based in non-urban areas.
3) Energy costs
Increasing the costs of producing resources like oil and gas not only hurts consumers but undermines Canada’s ability to compete in an increasingly protectionist global economy. Unlike Europe, which is energy-starved, Canada is a resource-rich nation. Canadians may want to see our policy framework reflect that reality.
4) Taxation fatigue
Many Canadians are instinctively skeptical of new federal taxes, seeing it as a potential cash grab scheme rather than a climate measure. The lesson from the consumer carbon tax is that dismissing those concerns as ignorance or manipulation is precisely the kind of condescension that fuels opposition.
There are valid reasons why the carbon tax failed, beyond political rhetoric. And all of these challenges will apply to Carney’s plan, just as they did to Trudeau’s.
