This article was published by The Energy Mix on March 26, 2025.
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.”
Be the first to comment