Smoke from wildfires in the provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia is seen on June 28, 2023 in Toronto.Ian Willms/Getty Images
In a federal election campaign dominated by U.S. tariffs and the cost of living, the two main parties vying to form the next government have spent little time debating the future of Canada’s climate action plans.
On Tuesday, the Conservative Party released its campaign platform mentioning climate action five times but with few specifics. By contrast, the party has an ambitious agenda to expand Canada’s oil and gas sector.
A Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre would fast-track construction of pipelines and other major energy infrastructure, scrap the emissions cap on oil and gas production, repeal the entire carbon tax, approve oil exports from Canada’s Arctic ports, and fast-track new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in British Columbia, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.
As well, the Conservatives promise to repeal the ban on large oil tanker ships off the West Coast, a ban that prevents tankers carrying heavy oil from stopping, loading or unloading at ports or marine installations along the northern B.C. coast. The Conservatives would also aim to double oil production in Newfoundland and Labrador.
On climate action, Mr. Poilievre proposes to reform investment tax credits to reward clean Canadian manufacturing and production to help lower emissions. And the party wants to export “cleaner” LNG to replace more carbon-intensive fossil fuels.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals have promised to fast-track major energy projects but the Conservatives are unequivocally committed to constructing new oil pipeline capacity, while Liberal Leader Mark Carney says “maybe pipelines” should be built.
The Liberal platform on climate action is more extensive, but the plan is still grounded in expanding Canada’s oil and gas sector.
Mr. Carney says he’d make Canada an energy superpower, arguing that the country can increase conventional energy production while leading on the clean energy transition.
Just ahead of the election campaign, Mr. Carney reduced the consumer carbon price to zero and pledged to eliminate it entirely. But he also wants to roll out a plan to ensure the oil and gas sector reaches net-zero emissions by 2050.
Caroline Brouillette, executive director of the Climate Action Network, a coalition of 150 Canadian environmental organizations, said neither of the two parties in contention to form government in the April 28 election have produced climate plans that map out how their policies will shape Canada’s carbon output.
“It’s a backslide from the 2021 election, where there was robust discussion around, not only the destination of our economic and social transformation in the face of climate change, but also what we were going to do to get there,” she said in an interview.
“There’s been truly a missed opportunity from the leaders contending for the job of prime minister right now to paint us a transformative vision of our economy that not only makes us more resilient in the face of shocks fomented by Donald Trump south of the border,” she said, “but also the volatility of the fossil fuel economy and the fact that the impacts of the climate crisis are economically going to be higher than those of the tariffs.”
After years of debate about climate change, the federal government put a price on carbon in 2019 as part of a plan to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions fell in 2023 by about 1 per cent from the previous year, but that is not enough to put the country on track to reach its goal of cutting emissions from 2005 levels by at least 40 per cent by 2030. As of 2023, emissions were only down by 8.5 per cent since 2005.
That push to reach GHG reduction targets has held little of the leaders’ attention in this campaign, as Canada’s trading relationship with the U.S. erodes. In 2023, Canada exported $124-billion of oil, and 97 per cent of it went to the United States, sold at a deep discount to prices on the world market. Finding new markets for Canadian oil and gas has emerged as a greater preoccupation for the two main parties.
The New Democratic Party, which supported the minority Liberal government in the last Parliament in exchange for some leverage over policy, outlined a climate action plan that would eliminate public subsidies and tax breaks for oil and gas companies, using the savings to pay for retrofitting homes with energy-saving upgrades. (The Liberals also say they would head in a similar direction, promising to develop a plan to phase out public financing of the fossil fuel sector.)
The Green Party would go further than the other parties, pledging to stop all new fossil fuel projects. The Greens would build a “modern” power grid across Canada, tapping into water, solar and wind power to transition Canada to using 100-per-cent clean energy.