This article was published by The Energy Mix on April 21, 2025.
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.
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