April 12, 2015
Observers of the current Canadian federal election have noted the marginalization of the environment and climate change as top-of-mind issues in the face of US President Trump’s threats and actions around sovereignty, security, and trade. But how Canada responds to Mr. Trump’s challenges will have profound implications for Canada’s future greenhouse gas emissions and those of other countries. The pathways chosen will carry with them enormous security, energy, trade, and environmental implications of their own.
The current federal election is very different from its 2015, 2019 and 2021 counterparts. In those elections, the environment and climate were central issues. Each time, more than 60% of Canadian voters chose parties (Liberal, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Green) who argued for strong climate action, including some form of carbon pricing.
The top-of-mind political landscape has shifted dramatically since then. The increasing evidence of the consequences of a changing climate had placed the environment and climate change among the leading issues, and frequently the leading issue, in the minds of Canadians for nearly two decades.
Although the arrival of the Trump administration in the US is often cited as the trigger point for a decline of the environment as a top-of-mind concern for Canadians, that slide had actually begun a year earlier, in the fall of 2023. Despite the record summer wildfire season that summer, the combination of the impacts of inflation, triggered in large part by the disruptions flowing from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, moved economic concerns to the forefront of the public’s mind. Government stimulus programs intended to counter the impacts of the pandemic reinforced the inflationary pressures, prompting the Bank of Canada to increase interest rates in response, further adding to Canadians’ economic distress.
In that context of high inflation and high interest rates, the federal government’s climate strategies, and in particular consumer carbon pricing, became an easy political target, particularly for an official opposition party with little apparent concern for the climate challenge.
That said, as is often the case with environmental issues, although no longer immediately at the top-of-mind Canadians’ minds, the environment, and climate change in particular, remain significant embedded concerns. Between 60 and 70% of Canadians continue to believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity, as has been the case for the past two decades. And perhaps surprisingly, despite the criticism levelled at consumer carbon pricing, and the new Prime Minister’s decision to remove the consumer carbon levy, between 60 and 70 per cent of non-Conservative leaning voters (i.e., Liberal, NDP, BQ and Green) continue to support the concept of carbon pricing.
Despite this, the immediate responses to Mr. Trump’s threats and actions have been something of a double down among many political leaders on the centrality of natural resource exports - particularly fossil fuels, and ‘critical’ minerals – to Canada’s future economy. This has been accompanied by calls to further ‘streamline’ environmental review and approval processes for resource extraction and export projects and infrastructures like pipelines, and to expand their subsidization by taxpayers. Discussions of the climate implications of these directions have been noticeably absent, as have been conversations about longer-term economic viability and desirability of expanding Canada’s dependency on resource commodity exports to increasingly uncertain global markets.
With respect to fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency and others are predicting that global consumption will peak within the next decade – a result of increasingly affordable renewable energy sources, improving energy productivity, and the necessity to avoid cooking the planet. That peak will likely be before any new major export infrastructure can be built in Canada, regardless of what review and approval requirements it might be subject to. In a world of declining fossil fuel consumption, Canada, increasingly reliant on high-cost (and high-carbon) production – oil sands crude and fracked and liquified natural gas – seems more likely to be among the first producers to fall, than among the last standing - making public investments in new export infrastructure very questionable propositions.
As for ‘Critical’ minerals, international markets are likely to remain in flux, as the pace of technology development in areas like renewable energy and energy storage accelerates to, among other things, reduce or avoid dependency on costly and difficult to access inputs. Mining operations themselves remain very high environmental impact activities with, in Canada’s case, significant implications for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.
All of this implies a need for continued meaningful and careful scrutiny of projects in terms of their implications for climate change, environmental sustainability, reconciliation, as well as their economic viability and potential long-term legacy costs and liabilities for taxpayers, not further streamlining of review processes to the point of meaninglessness.
More broadly, the resource double-down in response to Mr. Trump is fundamentally backwards in its outlook. It ignores the implications of the climate challenge. And, as recently noted by some Canadian business leaders, it ignores the need to not just diversify Canada’s markets, but to diversify Canada’s products as well. Canada needs to design and implement strategies that transform its industries from producers of low-value, raw materials into producers of higher-value products and services for a world that must decarbonize, while advancing sustainability.
As a coalition of mayors pointed out last week, climate change remains a real threat to Canadians and their communities – one that will not go away regardless of what Mr. Trump’s Executive Orders might say – and which demands a more substantive response from Canada’s would-be political leaders than we have seen so far.