You had to squint at the space between Steven Guilbeault's words in the House of Commons this week to discern a delicate indictment of the Carney government, writes Shannon Proudfoot.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
One word kept coming up this week, as Steven Guilbeault tendered his resignation from a government in which he no longer thought he could do his most important work.
The word was “room.” As in: Is there still room on the Liberal benches for an ardent environmentalist? Can the party offer room for pipeline and resource proponents, alongside people animated by climate concern?
I heard two different people frame it in more vividly specific terms: So, this version of the Liberal Party has room for Marilyn Gladu – formerly of the right flank of the Conservative Party – but not Steven Guilbeault?
And when you put it that way, it does highlight that the Liberal tent has stretched its current dimensions into some geometric shape previously unknown to humankind or to God himself.
Mr. Guilbeault’s departure from caucus is unsurprising, following on his resignation from cabinet last November because of the memorandum of understanding between the federal government and Alberta for a new pipeline.
In this political divorce, the couple has been drifting apart for some time, as the Carney government has loosened climate policies in pursuit of economic development – and now, national unity.
Guilbeault plans to exit politics, pursue climate fight in ‘different way’
When Mr. Guilbeault announced his resignation as an MP this week, he was graceful and restrained in his remarks in the House of Commons; you had to squint at the space between his words to see a delicate indictment.
He recalled sleeping on a gym floor in Berlin as a 25-year-old, with 600 other young people at the very first Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change in 1995. That set his life’s mission before him, he said, and he spent the next two decades doing climate work for NGOs.
In 2019, when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau asked him to join the government, Mr. Guilbeault’s one condition was that he could distance himself from the government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline.
“These intense, demanding and deeply meaningful seven years have been among the most formative of my life. I leave proud of what we have accomplished together,” he said in the House, adding, “The fight for our planet is the struggle of our generation, and I fully intend to keep fighting.”
In an interview afterward with CBC, he was more pointed, warning that Canada is currently “backsliding” in that fight.
Mr. Guilbeault is a true believer, fully committed to a cause for which he would never be able to swallow water with his wine. He did not make noisy threats about the Carney government’s new direction – he simply walked away when it no longer seemed like the place for him.
But while the former environment minister’s departure wasn’t shocking given his priorities, it was parsed inside the Ottawa bubble mostly for what it says about Mr. Carney’s own, and where his party now stands. How did the former UN special envoy on climate action and finance, and the author of Value(s) – a philosophical doorstop of a book about how the market is a deeply flawed measure of what really matters – decide to water down his own wine?
Prime Minister Mark Carney's pipeline memorandum of understanding with Alberta prompted Steven Guilbeault's resignation from cabinet last fall, and ultimately led to his departure from government.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
The Prime Minister has been questioned about this a lot lately. In response, Mr. Carney has argued again and again for end over means: that the goal is to reduce emissions in the most bang-for-your-buck ways possible, not cling to any particular policy.
Right before he signed the agreement with Alberta, Mr. Carney announced a national electricity strategy that, for now, consists mainly of consultations and lofty future goals.
“By far the biggest prize is reducing emissions affordably through electrification, not pursuing absolute purity in generation,” he said.
Then in Calgary the day he signed the deal, which included loosened industrial carbon pricing and a major carbon-capture project along with a pipeline, Mr. Carney faced multiple questions about his compromises. He maintains that the deal would replace an industrial carbon market that did not work with one that did.
“That’s how you make progress,” he said. “I’ve been an environmentalist, you know my career, UN special envoy on climate action. Those last two words: ‘climate action.’ This is climate action, this is investment, this is moving forward.”
And this week, right after Mr. Guilbeault told his colleagues that he was resigning, Mr. Carney exited the caucus meeting room smiling and chatting as he breezed past the baying reporters. The Prime Minister was partway up the staircase when a reporter asked in French whether the Liberals had abandoned the environment.
Mr. Carney could not resist turning and coming back down the stairs to dispute the idea and list their efforts.
All of these debates amount to insisting that Canada is doing just as much as it ever was, just in different form. It comes across as a personal argument for Mr. Carney about his own value(s), rather than political defensiveness.
Opinion: An environmental symbol slips out of Parliament
Climate policy has fallen precipitously down the list of top concerns for Canadians, as the U.S. trade war, economic storm clouds and the cost of living trump everything else. Mr. Carney has drawn a tight list of policy priorities and, for now, they align with what voters care about and are willing to accept.
“There’s no question – if you look just on paper at what came out of the MOU, versus what was in the letter of the federal legislation three weeks ago – that the climate policy is weaker now,” said Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta. “There’s no way around that.”
But he doesn’t think measuring Canada’s current climate plan against the earlier Trudeau policies is a fair or useful comparison. His explanation gets a bit cosmic, but it makes a lot of sense.
Mr. Leach pictures a graph with three lines. The first line represents what would have happened if Canada had maintained the Trudeau climate policies at full strength, and that line traces a pretty steep decline in carbon emissions. There’s another line above that one, showing more modest emission reductions under the policies Mr. Carney is now establishing.
And then there’s a third line, way above that one, showing much higher emissions because of what would have happened if Mr. Carney ran on maintaining all the Trudeau government’s climate policies. He would most likely have lost, and a prime minister Pierre Poilievre would have unwound it all, just as he’s always pledged.
“That world in which all of those policies are maintained probably doesn’t really exist,” Mr. Leach said.
That sounds like taking the world as it is.
It’s fascinating that it was Mr. Carney who introduced everyone to that notion, with such thunderous effect in Davos a few months ago, but it seems so difficult now for him to wrestle with what it means for his own climate credibility.