Prime Minister Mark Carney signed an agreement with Alberta last month aiming to boost oil production.Todd Korol/Reuters
Timing is everything.
The Liberals won a series of elections under Justin Trudeau in part by promising to significantly lower carbon emissions, and offering a more credible plan than their Conservative opponents. That plan, headlined by consumer carbon pricing, helped boost support for the Liberals and drain support from the Conservatives, particularly among swing voters in suburban Canada, in federal elections in 2015, 2019 and 2021. Carbon pricing was, at least in theory, quite popular.
But in 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won on a platform headlined by a promise to scrap the consumer carbon price – a promise that was also very popular.
And Mr. Carney last month signed an agreement with Alberta that aims to boost Canadian oil production and ensure the building at least one more major pipeline to tidewater, to maximize the economic benefits of added oil production. A Nanos Research poll suggests the approach is popular – even though it’s a reversal of the Trudeau Liberal policy of effectively limiting the output of Canada’s oil industry.
What gives? How are the Liberals winning by promising to undo what they once promised to do, which itself was once a winner?
Because that was then, and this is now.
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A decade ago, the federal consumer carbon tax was theoretical. It was presented as an issue of values, and discouraging pollution by asking polluters to pay. At first, the tax was so low that it was hard to notice. But the more it rose, moving from a promised future benefit to a visible present cost, the less voters liked it.
A thing that had once lifted Liberal popularity became a millstone. By 2024, the cost of the consumer fuel levy had become highly visible, while future benefits were increasingly confusing and opaque – the opposite of the situation a few years earlier, when the cost of emission reduction was distant and unclear, and talk of benefits was front and centre.
A 2018 poll by Abacus Data, conducted for the pro-carbon-pricing Ecofiscal Commission, foretold the path of public opinion.
The poll found that 74 per cent of Canadians were in favour of taking action on climate change – but the 13 other issues the poll offered for consideration ranked as higher priorities. Though most Canadians said they wanted governments to work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they also hoped that could happen without increasing their cost of living or weighing on the economy.
The Abacus poll was taken at a time when federal carbon pricing had not yet come into effect. It was still an abstraction, with no costs attached. Within a few years, however, the matter had turned into one involving real costs and trade-offs.
I supported the consumer carbon tax and its design as a revenue-neutral levy rebated back to taxpayers. But as it moved from theory to reality – as consumers learned that they were the “polluters” who would be paying – public opinion shifted.
And the re-election of U.S. President Donald Trump, bringing in its wake a year-long campaign of economic threats and actual harms, has led a worried Canadian public to question the logic of other policies that explicitly or implicitly hamstring our oil-and-gas industry.
As the 2018 poll suggested, Canadians care about carbon emissions, but they also care about other things. Some of those other things – such as the economy and the health of their own finances – were a higher priority then, and remain so today. The trade-offs weren’t as apparent then, but they are now.
Asked if they were in favour of building an oil pipeline to the north coast of B.C., “even if the province of British Columbia opposes it,” a majority of Canadians surveyed by Nanos between Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 were supportive – including a majority of British Columbians.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says a memorandum of understanding with Alberta strengthens federal-provincial collaboration in the energy sector. Calgary business leaders responded to his speech with a standing ovation, while one environmentalist says the deal throws the climate 'under the bus.'
The Canadian Press
No other major oil-producing country has a policy of trying to keep oil in the ground, regardless of global demand. There does not appear to be a tide of public opinion demanding that Canada bear the high economic cost of being the lone outlier.
Canadians are also more than vaguely aware that even if we were to shut down our entire oil industry, the impact on global carbon emissions would be a rounding error. Just 1.4 per cent of global emissions come from Canada, compared with more than 29 per cent for China. Since 2005, Canada’s emissions have fallen by 8.5 per cent. That’s behind schedule on the goal of achieving a 40-per-cent drop by 2030. But since 2005, China’s emissions have roughly doubled.
The average Canadian doesn’t want emission rules entirely scrapped, or emission targets entirely ignored. But life is about trade-offs, as are economics and politics. Mr. Carney may have found not just an economic sweet spot, but a political one. It could be the modern Canadian equivalent of Richard Nixon going to China.
Nixon’s long-standing anti-Communism reassured American voters suspicious of opening relations with the People’s Republic. Mr. Carney’s long-standing support for emission reductions gives middle-of-the-road suburban voters reason to believe that he can be trusted to keep an eye on the environment – even as he puts more emphasis on the economic benefit of producing and exporting more Canadian oil.