This editorial was written and published by the Globe & Mail on January 5, 2025.
It should have been clear in November, 2024, when Donald Trump won re-election that Canada needed to act with urgency to end the drift of (especially) the past decade, during which the federal government dangerously neglected the basics of safeguarding national sovereignty.
The alarm bells were seemingly heeded last spring, when Mr. Trump launched his trade war and started greedily eyeing Canada as the 51st state. Against the odds, the Liberals won re-election under Mark Carney on the promise of an elbowsup response to Mr. Trump’s provocations.
But that promised response has not materialized, despite other worrying developments. In November, the U.S. administration published a National Security Strategy that would dramatically curtail the sovereignty of any Western Hemisphere country, Canada included.
Then came the U.S. military strike on Venezuela on Saturday. Any thought that Canada could simply wait out Mr. Trump’s term in the White House ended this weekend.
There has been no shortage of rhetoric from Prime Minister Mark Carney about the need to expand Canada’s military capacity and to end economic stagnation. What has been lacking for more than a year is action commensurate to the national emergency in which Canada finds itself.
The conundrum that Canada faces is that there is no immediate fix to today’s emergency. It will take years to build a new pipeline, and years to fully rebuild Canada’s military. Which is why there is not a moment more to lose.
The Liberals have talked about doubling non-U.S. exports over the coming decade. But what will happen this year? This month? The Liberals have talked about increasing Canada’s military spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. What steps will be taken in 2026? The Liberals have signed a memorandum with Alberta that sets the stage for an oil pipeline to the Pacific. It’s a solid first step, but when will the next one come?
The right answer, the only answer, must be immediately, for the three herculean tasks of diversifying Canada’s exports, revitalizing the domestic economy and rebuilding this country’s military capacity.
The single biggest step that Ottawa can take in diversifying exports is to ensure a new bitumen pipeline to the West Coast is constructed. The economic logic was unassailable before the U.S. seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Now, the United States is vowing to ramp up Venezuelan crude production, which would swell supplies of heavy oil for U.S. refiners – driving down prices for Alberta producers. The immediate response must be to green-light additional capacity for the Ottawa-owned Trans Mountain pipeline. The company has said it intends to boost capacity over the next five years. That timeline needs to be accelerated to start this year.
More important, Ottawa must work with Alberta to secure a private proponent in the coming months for a new oil pipeline, underpinned by a commitment that all regulatory approvals will be granted in under two years.
There will need to be consultation and accommodation with Indigenous communities to fulfill Ottawa’s constitutional duty. But the Liberal government must make it clear in those talks (and to any obstructionist premier) that the only question to be discussed is how a pipeline will be built.
The same kind of leadership is needed for the forging of a national economy. The promise of internal free trade has devolved, yet again, into inter-provincial squabbling. The federal government needs to step in to ensure that internal trade barriers are dismantled speedily and permanently.
Ottawa already has the only tool it needs, in the form of its very deep pockets. Federal funds should be made contingent on provinces and territories tearing down trade barriers.
On national defence, the Carney government has taken some initial measures to boost military capacity. But the announcements last year of an increase in defence spending and procurement reform are, at most, an overdue first step.
Recruitment needs to quicken, now. Procurement delays need to end, now. Any minister who attempts to detour spending into regional pork-barrelling should be booted from cabinet. Any staff officer who gets in the way of ending the bureaucratic snarls of procurement must be cashiered.
In June, former U.S. ambassador Kelly Craft told a Toronto business audience that if Canada doesn’t like being called a 51st state, it should stop acting like one. Those may be hard words for Canadians to hear, but they underscore the seriousness of the moment, and the urgency of action.
This article was written by Alessia Passafiume and was published in the Toronto Star on January 1, 2026.
With her government under pressure to finally eliminate boilwater advisories in First Nations communities, the federal minister responsible for Indigenous services isn’t committing to bringing back a defunct clean water bill in the new year as written — after two provinces objected to it.
That bill, which died when the last federal election was called, was drafted with input from First Nations and sought to ensure they could protect fresh water sources on their own territories.
Prime Minister Mark Carney promised chiefs at the Assembly of First Nations’ gathering early in December that new clean water legislation would come in the spring.
The bill sought to ensure First Nations could protect fresh water sources on their own territories
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy GullMasty told the Canadian Press last summer she was committed to reintroducing the previous legislation — despite opposition from the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario, which warned in a media statement that reintroducing the bill as written would “undermine competitiveness and delay project development.”
GullMasty vowed in the summer the new bill would affirm First Nations have a human right to access clean drinking water. She did not explain how that might work after the passage of legislation in June that speeds up the approval timeline for major infrastructure projects and gives cabinet the ability to sidestep some environmental laws.
In a followup interview with the Canadian Press earlier in December, GullMasty would not commit to including the same source water protections in the new bill. She also wouldn’t say if she is pushing for those protections around the cabinet table.
“I don’t want to put aside work that has previously been done. I think that’s foundational. But I do think there has to be a component where you are having that regionalized approach,” she said.
“That bill, while it may not have been perfect, I think has really put a lot of opportunity on the table. When we come back in the spring, we will be announcing what the bill is going to look like.”
Carney promised Canadians during the spring election campaign that his government would move rapidly to materially improve their lives.
But many Indigenous leaders say the government’s progress on addressing their own communities’ critical priorities slowed to a crawl over the past 12 months — that 2025 was a lost year for efforts to repair drinking water systems, reform the child welfare system and eradicate tuberculosis in the North.
In early 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Ottawa’s chronic underfunding of First Nations child welfare services was discriminatory because it meant kids living onreserve were given fewer services than those living offreserve.
The tribunal tasked Canada with reaching an agreement with First Nations to reform the system and compensate those who were torn from their families and put in foster care.
The Trudeau government, following negotiations with the Chiefs of Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Assembly of First Nations, presented a $47.8 billion compensation and reform package in 2024. First Nations chiefs and their proxies voted to reject it that same year; many opposed it because the funding would only be available for 10 years and would be subject to annual reviews.
After the tribunal ordered both sides to present it with new child welfare settlement plans by the end of December, it ended up with two proposals. Ottawa’s would provide $35.5 billion in funding up to 20332034, followed by an ongoing commitment of $4.4 billion annually. The First Nations proposal, meanwhile, calls for the codevelopment of a statutory funding mechanism between First Nations and Ottawa.
GullMasty told the Canadian Press she has spent a lot of time analyzing the file, learning what different groups want and thinking through approaches to reform.
“We’re obliged to respond to the tribunal, but we are also obliged to respond to communities that are asking for their own process,” she said.
This opinion was written by David Olive and was published in the Toronto Star on December 31, 2025.
In Mark Carney’s telling, he is still in the vanguard of fighting climate change.
That assertion is, on the surface, difficult to sustain given the prime minister’s apparent retreat on the climate front.
Carney scrapped the national consumer carbon tax soon after he became prime minister in March.
His “nationbuilding” projects under consideration for fasttracking unveiled this year include fossil fuel developments.
And the highprofile entente Carney negotiated between Ottawa and Alberta in November unwinds major climate change policies of the Trudeau government.
The controversial “memorandum of understanding” between the two governments effectively greenlights a second crude oil pipeline from the Alberta oilpatch to the B.C. coast — a sister to the Trans Mountain oil pipeline (TMX) that began operations in 2024.
The TMX reduces Canada’s reliance on the U.S. market for oil exports. Almost half of its volume in its first year of operation went to nonU.S. markets, notably China.
The starting point for Carney’s energy policy might be an offhand remark he made in one of several revealing yearend television interviews he gave just before Christmas.
“I am a politician, but I’m still a pragmatist,” Carney told the CBC.
Canada continues to fight climate change, Carney asserts, but with a more practical approach.
“Climate change is continuing remorselessly,” Carney said.
In addressing it more effectively, “there is a moral imperative, a moral obligation to future generations,” Carney said. Acting on that imperative, in Carney’s view, requires more comprehensive policies.
They consist, in a nutshell, of ramping up production of both “clean energy,” with major investments in hydroelectricity and nuclear power, and fossil fuels, because “the world is going to use hydrocarbons for coming decades” under every scenario experts put forward, Carney said.
For Carney the question is: “What kind of hydrocarbons are going to be used?” The answer, he said, is “low cost, low risk, low carbon. If Canada is going to continue to supply hydrocarbons, it needs to be low carbon.”
Meanwhile, Carney said, “we’re going to grow clean energy in this country at a scale never seen before.”
Is it possible for Canada to become an energy superpower, a transformation that Carney has promised Canadians, and still meet our netzero emissions targets for greenhouse gases?
In Carney’s vision, squaring that circle is possible with a new approach. That approach is to develop every kind of energy source, and to pair regulations with significant investment.
“We have too much regulation and not enough action,” Carney said of the energy policies he inherited.
And it’s true that with all the regulations, limitations and bans imposed on the energy sector by the Trudeau government, Canada is still far short of meeting its emissions reduction targets.
Carney vowed that his government is “one hundred per cent focused on doing things that are going to reduce emissions.”
Those things are going to cost scores of billions of dollars. They also promise to generate considerable economic activity.
They include lowcarbon liquified natural gas plants (LNG), a new clean electricity grid in B.C., cleanpower interties between provinces, the mininuclear reactors Ontario has under development, the world’s first zerocarbon copper mine in Saskatchewan, and a huge wind farm off the Nova Scotia coast.
Carney expects that most of the money for those transformative projects will come from the private sector and not the public purse, a contrast with the $34billion Ottawa spent building the TMX.
The memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and Alberta is something of a template. Alberta gets favourable Ottawa consideration of a second crude oil pipeline to the B.C. coast; removal of planned Trudeauera caps on oilpatch emissions; and a lifting of the federal oil tanker ban off the B.C. coast.
In return, the Alberta oilpatch builds a multibilliondollar carbon capture and storage facility that removes 16 megatons of carbon from its oil and gas production — roughly equal to taking 90 per cent of Alberta’s cars and trucks off the road.
It also removes about 75 per cent of methane emissions, a more potent contributor to climate change than CO2. And the oilpatch must pay more than six times the current industrial carbon tax — an incentive to decarbonize.
For Canada to pioneer “decarbonized” hydrocarbons is, Carney said, “an enormous opportunity for this country to leapfrog the United States.
“The United States has taken its eye off the ball on this — they’ve really downgraded it.”
So, the goal is to become a cleanenergy superpower, an advantage over rival hydrocarbon producers the U.S., the Middle East and Russia.
Much of the money to transform the Canadian energy sector will come from abroad, Carney believes.
“Virtually everyone wants to do more with Canada,” said Carney, who spent much of 2025 travelling in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
In addition to Canada’s political stability, “we’re an increasingly confident nation that has ambitions,” Carney said. “So, people want to deal with us.”
This article was written by Adam Radwanski and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 20, 2025.
Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson arrives for a meeting of the federal cabinet in West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Tim Hodgson is not much for pleasantries. The Bay Street-minded minister is keen to work with business to get pitches ready for prime time. If he offends some sensibilities in Ottawa along the way, so be it
For companies that arrive cap-in-hand to pitch energy or mining projects that might meet Canada’s moment of economic reckoning, a sit-down with the most influential member of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet can be a novel and jarring experience. Tim Hodgson isn’t much for the pleasantries that usually kick off such meetings, sometimes at length, with other ministers. Nor does he make broadly enthusiastic if non-committal noises about whatever is on the table, being gentle in discussing qualms or potential roadblocks, or spending much time talking about where the project might fit into the wider policy landscape.
Instead, Mr. Hodgson – who this year went straight from a long career as an investment banker to being the country’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister – tends to almost immediately go deeply and unsparingly into the proposal’s financial fundamentals.
If he thinks proponents are wasting their time, he doesn’t hold back letting them know. If he thinks there’s strong potential, he’ll ask tough questions and poke holes if there are any. He can sometimes lecture, even if his visitors might have more experience than he does with the type of project being discussed.
Enough people found Mr. Hodgson’s bedside manner off-putting, in his first months on the job, that his staff encouraged him to soften it.
But to others, including some who have endured his bluntness, it’s a major virtue – forcing companies to up their game when seeking federal support, giving them a clearer sense than previously of how to get across the finish line, and helping the government figure out which projects really deserve to be fast tracked for permitting or public financing.
And in the eyes of admirers – including, by all accounts, a Prime Minister who counts him as his closest friend and confidant in cabinet – it’s one of the ways that Mr. Hodgson is necessarily reorienting Ottawa’s relationship with resource-based industries on which it’s largely pinning Canada’s hopes for greater economic sovereignty in the face of U.S. aggression.
To get a sense of what that involves, The Globe and Mail interviewed more than 20 people who have interacted with Mr. Hodgson during his seven months in office – including industry leaders, lobbyists and government officials – as well as Mr. Hodgson himself.
What emerged, through descriptions of his dealings with industry and within government, is a picture of a minister who is highly unusual in ways that perfectly align with Mr. Carney’s economic ambitions, yet could pose some risk to them.
Veteran executives who enter government tend to talk about running it more like the private sector, but Mr. Hodgson is proving better positioned and more determined to do so than most.
Less interested than colleagues in Liberal orthodoxy or policy debates, he’s squarely focused on reaching investment deals – including for criticalmineral extraction, oil-and-gas infrastructure and carbon-capture technology that is billed as making it sustainable, and to strengthen electricity grids – at a pace to which Ottawa is unaccustomed.
He’s more accessible than his predecessors to industry and spends less time on the minutiae of his department. He remains so inclined toward Bay Street language that ministry officials half-joke they need to send him term sheets, not briefing notes.
Yet despite his private-sector track record – highlighted by a Goldman Sachs tenure in which he became chief executive officer of its Canadian operations, a stint as managing partner of private investment firm Alignvest Management Corp. and an array of recent board memberships that included chairing Ontario’s Hydro One Ltd. – he has entered Ottawa with limited knowledge of its workings.
His public-sector experience was limited to less than two years as an adviser to Mr. Carney at the Bank of Canada, which is not closely connected to the rest of government. His political experience was virtually non-existent, and he had no known history with the party he is now serving. He’s known among friends to be deeply patriotic, informed by continuing his family’s history of military service before entering business and by charitable work for veterans, but few previously imagined him seeking office.
“I was shocked,” said Jim Leech, the former Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan CEO who is close to Mr. Hodgson. Mr. Leech thought it likelier that Mr. Hodgson, whom he considers a somewhat fiscally conservative political centrist like himself, would ease into retirement, before a sense of duty and the chance to serve with his friend Mr. Carney beckoned.
Already, Mr. Hodgson has encountered potential pitfalls. Among them: running afoul of other Liberals as he steers a de-prioritization of climate goals in favour of re-embracing the oil-and-gas sector, and misaligning the need for speed with getting First Nations support that could make or break projects he’s pursuing.
So, authoritative though he is poring over capital stacks with would-be investors, Mr. Hodgson has been on a steep learning curve when it comes to the demands of public life, and what being a chief dealmaker on the government’s side of the table really entails.
Mr. Hodgson is not especially inclined toward reflecting on that personal journey thus far, at least for public consumption.
Asked at the start of an interview in his office what lessons he’s taken from his first months in Ottawa, he replied with more of an explanation of a governing philosophy that he (like Mr. Carney) has seemingly adopted from the get-go.
“I think what I’ve learned is actually not that different than business: You need to be pragmatic,” he said. “When you come in and you sort of have rigid thinking or ideological rigidness, you miss opportunities to get things done.”
Behind the scenes, however, he has indeed been attempting to improve as he goes along.
That applies, most obviously, to public performance – making the case for the government’s agenda and answering critical questions.
Despite a commanding boardroom presence, he’s not a natural behind a microphone. Delivering introductory speeches to business audiences shortly after entering cabinet, he read from prepared texts in a monotone, occasionally stumbling over words.
He also does not particularly care for performing political theatre. He surprised himself by enjoying knocking on doors in his Greater Toronto Area riding during this year’s election campaign, he said, where largely first-generation Canadians “fully understand this is the greatest country in the world” and counterbalanced the “everything’s broken” grumbling he was hearing in elite circles. But he is sourer on Ottawa’s daily cut-and-thrust.
“Look, I have colleagues who relish the sport of Question Period,” he said. “I find it somewhat disingenuous, and I guess a necessary part of democracy.”
He can also get frustrated by media coverage. Discussing Indigenous relations, he recalled going to a First Nations summit where he felt that the vast majority of chiefs were supportive of his pitch about shared economic prosperity, or open-minded, only for journalists to seek out the small minority who were hostile to it.
Nevertheless, he appeared to recognize from the outset that this was an area of vulnerability and, according to staff, proved more willing than some rookie ministers to undertake media training.
The results have been imperfect. One of the worst moments of his fledgling political career came weeks ago, when he was asked by a TV interviewer about ensuring Indigenous consultation around a potential oil pipeline and replied that “It’s called Zoom.” (He apologized the next day.)
But such flashes of impatience have been less common than might be expected of someone known for them in private. And he has started to make speaking publicly look a little less like a chore.
In the interview for this story, he discussed aspects of his job in some detail without talking himself into trouble. And he managed a dash of folksiness when he brought up how childhood experiences in an Armed Forces family across Canada – in logging and mill towns, in Nova Scotia with kids who’d miss school to work on lobster boats, at a vocational high school where friends went on to oil rigs – help make his current job feel visceral.
A common hope, among allies, is that he’s landing in a sweet spot where he can speak political language well enough to get by while maintaining some plain-spoken outsider appeal.
Corey Hogan, a Liberal MP from Calgary who is a parliamentary secretary to Mr. Hodgson, pointed to a recent parliamentary committee appearance where Mr. Hodgson responded to Conservative badgering with the air of someone accustomed to doing business in the real world, and bemused by his inquisitors’ disinterest in hearing actual answers to their questions.
“His power is he acts like a normal executive in these situations,” Mr. Hogan said.
The rookie minister’s executive instincts were on display, in a different way, as he began his new job.
Government officials who interacted with him immediately following his swearing-in last May were struck by his negativity toward Ottawa’s bureaucratic and political culture – a mindset, common on Bay Street, that the capital was beset by laziness and incompetence.
The impression they got, not entirely different from one conveyed by Mr. Carney, was that Mr. Hodgson viewed himself as an adult who had arrived to cut the nonsense.
At the same time, he also understandably had limited knowledge of government processes or his departmental responsibilities. Before long, he had to lean on some of the same civil servants and political staff to show him the ropes, and learn the levers at his disposal and the complexities of balancing different interests.
There have been some tells, as to recognizing the starting point wasn’t quite as bad as he thought.
One of them has been in how he’s sought to reduce federal-provincial overlap in approving energy and resource investments, and deliver on Mr. Carney’s “one project, one review” campaign promise.
As he boasted in the interview, Ottawa has recently moved in that direction by reaching co-operation agreements with provinces through provisions in the existing Impact Assessment Act – an effort that began under his predecessor, Jonathan Wilkinson. Meanwhile, controversial powers to override normal permitting processes under the Building Canada Act, which the government hurriedly pushed through shortly after Mr. Carney and Mr. Hodgson took over, have yet to be used.
But if his views have softened, he hasn’t abandoned them entirely. Asked whether government is as broken as he thought coming in, Mr. Hodgson homed in on what he sees as an abundance of caution mismatched with the hinge moment that Mr. Carney frequently invokes.
“My observation of government is that the default modality is that not making a decision is less risky than making a decision,” he said, suggesting it’s easier to buy time while waiting for more information.
“We don’t have that luxury. We need to make decisions. We need to retool our economy … And that requires a level of boldness and ambition in government that hasn’t really been there.”
Toward that end, he has (more than many incoming ministers) jettisoned most of the policy staff he inherited from Mr. Wilkinson, who was known as a policy wonk committed to carefully finding the right balance between economic and environmental goals. To replace them, he’s largely sought out young staff who, like him, have more financial than political experience.
Among bureaucrats, meanwhile, word has spread that Mr. Hodgson expects advice sent to him to be quick and to the point, with as many numbers and as little word salad as possible.
That is, if those bureaucrats are engaging with him at all. There are corners of his ministry, including those dedicated primarily to reckoning with aspects the long-term transition to low-carbon energy, that have yet to have much contact with him.
That lack of access, which has prompted some grumbling internally, has not been a complaint from industry – at least sectors such as oil and gas, nuclear, mining and forestry, in which Mr. Carney’s government sees opportunity to leverage existing strengths.
Their members have found Mr. Hodgson as accessible, if brisk, as any minister they can recall.
“He’s clear, he’s blunt and he’s up-front – which is refreshing,” said Explorers and Producers Association of Canada president Tristan Goodman, whose organization represents fossil-fuel extractors outside the oil sands.
How Mr. Hodgson chooses to spend his time points toward his emphasis on the nitty-gritty of reaching specific deals rather than obsessing over broader policy frameworks. Though leveraging his position to nail down investments is also likely a more complex undertaking than when he was in the private sector.
It’s not as though Mr. Hodgson can make snap permitting decisions, many of which don’t even rest with his ministry, when at the table across from project proponents.
And while his meetings tend to focus heavily on the financials, he’s limited in what he can directly do there, too.
The government’s largest vehicles for loans, equity stakes, offtake agreements and other forms of concessional financing to get projects off the ground – including the Canada Growth Fund, Canada Infrastructure Bank and new Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corp. – are all supposed to function with high degrees of independence.
Now in the mix, too, is the Major Projects Office established by Mr. Carney and run out of Calgary by former energy executive Dawn Farrell, which is meant to provide some regulatory and financial co-ordination.
Mr. Hodgson does have some dollars at his disposal, including a $2-billion critical minerals fund in last month’s budget. And there are plenty of projects, particularly in that sector, that are too small to go to the MPO but could collectively add up.
But there are other ways he wields his influence, some formal and some less so.
Among his responsibilities is chairing the Build Canada committee, which Mr. Carney established and which Mr. Hodgson described as cabinet’s main economic committee, responsible for trying to spur $500-billion of investment across sectors.
Among its focuses, he said, is “de-pancaking” regulations (reducing overlap across departments), plus being “a fulcrum for all the different financing tools and a convening forum.”
Build Canada oversees the MPO, and Mr. Hodgson sits on the MPO’s investment committee, so he has some sway over what gets referred there and how the office gets rolling.
His job is partly to serve as the government’s eyes and ears for what potential investments, big and small, are out there. And then there is how he puts his business acumen to use in determining which possibilities are credible – particularly important in mining, as a wide range of companies seek to capitalize on the frenzy to counter China’s critical-minerals dominance.
As for how he tries to make those assessments, and work with proponents to get pitches ready for prime time, Mr. Hodgson invoked the five factors in the Building Canada Act for designating large projects to be in the national interest, which may be instructive of how hard the government tries to advance smaller projects as well.
Boiled down, those criteria include strengthening Canada’s sovereignty, providing economic benefit, having a high likelihood of success, and advancing Indigenous interests and climate-change objectives.
He gave the example of a pair of projects. If “a great proponent” had a projected internal rate of return of 20 per cent, it would seem a slam dunk. If another pencilled out to only an 8 per cent IRR, it might not totally align with the likelihood of success metric. But if it were in something such as rare earths, it could be enough of a strategic priority to try to advance anyway.
In that case, he might try to help figure out which financial tools at the government’s disposal – low-interest lending, equity stakes, money for surrounding infrastructure – might get the rate of return to a more attractive level.
Those conversations would happen with the proponent and within Mr. Hodgson’s department. “I’m kind of like: Hey, how have you thought about it? How have you priced this out? Have you thought through the five criteria and what are the tools to help us get there? And do we think if we’ve referred this to the MPO, they’d be supportive?”
What Mr. Hodgson didn’t say, but others in government observed, is that he will sometimes then try to wield soft power around Ottawa, signalling to other departments and agencies that he thinks targeted dollars could get a desirable project over the line. The same can go for the permitting side. The idea is to get everything moving quickly in lockstep, not slowly in piecemeal fashion.
Such efforts are taken seriously by other ministers and officials, both because of Mr. Hodgson’s expertise and because they know how much Mr. Carney has entrusted him.
But his perceived influence on the government’s agenda could also prove a double-edged sword – including with members of the governing party to which he is a newcomer.
Initially, Mr. Hodgson did not seem terribly concerned about endearing himself to fellow Liberal caucus members, whom he made little secret of considering fortunate to have gotten or kept their jobs by virtue of Mr. Carney’s leadership. He has since worked harder to build bridges, making himself accessible and proving willing to delegate to his parliamentary secretaries, Mr. Hogan and Quebec MP Claude Guay.
There is nevertheless a large fault line running between him and the many Liberal MPs for whom an ambitious agenda to combat climate change is an article of faith.
Mr. Hodgson was not primarily responsible for last month’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta, in which Ottawa agreed to drop or soften several environmental policies put in place under former prime minister Justin Trudeau in return for strengthening industrial carbon pricing, and opened the door to a new oil pipeline. Although he was involved, the negotiations were led by top officials from the Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office.
But while he is the point person for the government’s pursuit of investments in conventional energy, he has not shown quite the same level of enthusiasm for renewable power, and even his admirers in government concede he’s at the leastgreen end of the Liberal spectrum.
One of the corporate boards he sat on was that of oil-sands producer MEG Energy Corp. And asked how he sees Canada’s place in the global energy transition, he spoke almost entirely about fossil fuels, including through advancing (still notional) carbon-capture projects in the oil sands and exporting natural gas as a transition fuel.
As for his message to climate-concerned colleagues, he invoked broader benefits. “If we produce the cleanest, best version of those products, our allies want them,” he said.
“It’s a point of national security, and we can use that revenue to pay for our $10-a-day daycare, our new dental care program and our school lunch programs … or provincially pay for universal health care or subsidized postsecondary education. I think Canadians say, ‘Hey, we should do that.’ ”
On another point of concern for many members of the government, relations with Indigenous leaders and communities, Mr. Hodgson went further out of his way in the interview to signal it as a shared priority. Invoking success during his time chairing Hydro One in partnering with First Nations to build transmission lines, he emphasized the importance of Indigenous participation in all projects while acknowledging he’s still learning countrywide dynamics.
Still, his move-fast approach has already at times seemed an awkward fit with Indigenous leadership’s desire for extensive consultation.
On these and other potential tension points, Mr. Hodgson seemingly has Mr. Carney’s blessing and is doing his bidding. But a possibility flagged by veterans of Liberal politics is that he could become a lightning rod for caucus members reluctant to challenge their leader and wanting someone else to blame for a rightward shift.
It’s unlikely that danger is keeping Mr. Hodgson up at night. Based on all available accounts, he holds no great political ambitions, is in Ottawa because Mr. Carney asked him, and will judge himself primarily by how many deals he gets done in whatever time he has there.
It’s too early for him or anyone else to pass that judgment.
There have been initial signs of success, mostly around minerals, highlighted by investments in six mining and processing projects in Ontario and Quebec announced on the margins of a G7 summit this fall. But most of the other, larger projects referred to the MPO thus far were in the works before Mr. Carney and Mr. Hodgson took office.
By the standards they’ve set for themselves, the real test will be how much, and how quickly, the deal flow picks up in 2026 and beyond. And if the chief dealmaker offends some sensibilities along the way, so be it.
“What the Prime Minister has said, which I’ve taken to heart,” Mr. Hodgson said, “is that we need to focus on outcomes, not how we get there.”
This article was written by David Baxter and was published in the Toronto Star on December 19, 2025.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have signed an agreement to speed up the approval of major projects in the province under a “one project, one process, one decision” model.
This approach means that projects that would have been subject to environmental assessments at both the federal and provincial levels will now go through Ontario’s process alone when the project is located primarily within the province.
“It’s time for Canada to build big things again. And nowhere will the impact of this deal be felt more immediately than in the development of the Ring of Fire,” Ford told a Ottawa press conference Thursday.
Carney said projects will use the federal process when Ottawa has primary jurisdiction and a mixed assessment system when they fall under shared jurisdiction.
“That will make approvals more efficient, delivering major projects faster while maintaining both federal and provincial standards,” Carney said. “By working together, we will work with the same information, we will have the same timelines, and we will respect each other’s jurisdictions.”
The prime minister said in French that the federal government is negotiating similar deals with Manitoba and Prince Edward Island. Carney added he wants to get similar deals in place with every province.
The Ontario agreement also contains language that sets a deadline for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to complete its review of roads to planned mining projects in the Ring of Fire region of northern Ontario by June 2026.
The Ring of Fire is home to major critical mineral deposits and the provincial and federal governments see it as a major economic driver.
This article was written by John Lorinc and was published in the Toronto Star on December 18, 2025.
Since we’ve all been talking about floor crossing, here’s my question: why doesn’t Liberal MP, and now former cabinet minister, Steven Guilbeault, cross the floor of the House of Commons to join Elizabeth May’s Green Party, which needs a dose of renewal in the worst way?
Two weeks ago, after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his rapprochement with Alberta, Guilbeault, then serving as culture minister and Quebec lieutenant, took the principled decision to resign from cabinet, knowing his government’s actions with respect to pipelines and federal climate policy no longer aligned with his beliefs about global warming.
As he wrote in these pages shortly after he resigned, “I view the latest federalprovincial energy deal as a significant step backwards in the fight against climate change — that it is in fact a fire sale rather than a grand bargain. The CanadaAlberta MOU abandons several key measures that were painstakingly modelled, consulted on, negotiated and implemented or proposed over the last decade.”
Guilbeault arrived in national politics after a highprofile career as an environmental activist with Greenpeace, his outlook aligning well with former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s.
As environment and climate change minister from 2021 to 2025, Guilbeault drove an ambitious agenda that included elements such as the clean fuel regulations and Canada’s first longterm emissions reduction plan aimed at reducing Canada’s greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.
He, of course, had to answer for some of the government’s politically unpopular decisions, including the acquisition of the TMX pipeline and the deluge of criticism from the oilpatch about Ottawa’s environmental assessment processes, widely seen in Western Canada as an effort to deter investment in natural resource extraction. Such are the tradeoffs of power.
Once Carney took office, however, it quickly became pretty obvious that a highprofile Trudeauadjacent environmentalist like Guilbeault would not survive for long. Yes, Carney’s nationbuilding agenda gestures at climate policy, and the prime minister himself has a long history of advocating for climate finance in his various post-Bank of Canada roles. But given the fourdimensional chess match that defines politics in 2025 — Trump, Poilievre, a minority Parliament, a highly vulnerable economy, global security spasms etc. — Carney & Co. have opted to kick Ottawa’s climate agenda down the road, citing, repeatedly, the need to start building again as a way of fortifying Canada’s public services and standard of living.
Politics is about choices, and Canadians will have the opportunity to judge whether Carney jumped on the right horse. Yet in his government’s shift to the political middle generally, and the political right when it comes to climate policy, I’d argue there’s a grave risk that voters are not hearing enough about the environmental costs of these decisions.
During the budget debate, Elizabeth May extracted a question period answer from the prime minister about Ottawa’s direction, which seems, well, inadequate. I’d like to hear more pushback and strenuous policy debate, especially when it comes to engaging with Ottawa’s emerging energy policy choices and their longterm consequences for Canada’s economy.
Case in point: a September essay in Foreign Policy Magazine posited a looming “ecological cold war,” in which the winners — China and its satellites/clients — were those nations that had bet hard on the energy transition and renewables. The countries that remained dependent on fossil fuels (the U.S., Russia and their respective satellites), argued Nils Gilman, of the L.A.based think tank Berggruen Institute, would experience economic decline and geopolitical instability. Guess which side we’re on?
This is a view I’d like to have articulated in our national debates, and Guilbeault, by virtue of his expertise and background, is exceptionally wellpositioned to make that case. Except that he can’t, because he’s now a backbencher in a government that has chosen a different path.
From where I sit, he could not only join the Greens but provide a muchneeded boost to a party that should be punching well above its current weight class (one sitting MP). For years, the federal Greens have been mired in a gong show succession process, with the result that their vote share and seat share has shifted into reverse, even as the signs of the climate crisis become more and more difficult to ignore.
Some of this absurd watertreading is due to the party’s weird internal structure and constitution, with its provisions for “coleaders.” But all those insidebaseball shenanigans about selecting leaders have done a huge disservice to the broader voting public, a portion of whom want to see Canada adopt a more robust approach to the climate crisis and the largely untapped economic opportunities afforded by investment in climate action. As long as the federal Greens flounder, those voters have to look elsewhere. For a while, that elsewhere was the Trudeau Liberals. Those days are gone.
Guilbeault is the genuine article — a bona fide climate activist with a seat in Parliament. I’d like to see Guilbeault seize this moment and cast his lot with a party that desperately needs its own energy transition.
This article was written by Jeff Gray and Laura Stone, and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 18, 2025.
A helicopter moves fuel between work sites near the Ring of Fire mineral deposit in Northern Ontario in October. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made a push to extract critical minerals from the Ring of Fire a central theme for years.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford will finalize a deal on Thursday to cut red tape for mines and other major projects − with a side agreement that could allow preliminary work to begin next year on a road to the remote Ring of Fire area.
A draft of the overall deal, unveiled last month, is similar to agreements with Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia, which signed its accord in 2019. The arrangements allow Ottawa to defer to provincial processes for environmental assessments and Indigenous consultations for major projects that fall under the purview of its Impact Assessment Act, with an eye to reducing duplication.
Ottawa and Ontario will also formally unveil a Nov. 24 letter sent to the Ontario government by the head of the federal Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC) that says it could wrap up its reviews of segments of the proposed Ring of Fire road by June, 2026, and allow some preliminary work to start, three years earlier than Queen’s Park had expected.
A provincial government source confirmed that the deals would be formally announced at an event in Ottawa on Thursday. The Globe and Mail is not naming the source, as they were not authorized to speak about the event publicly. Audrey Champoux, a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office, declined to comment on the deal on Wednesday.
Despite the agreements, mining in the Ring of Fire − an expanse of muskeg about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay − remains many years away. A completed environmental assessment for the final segment of the road into the Ring of Fire is still expected to take another three years, and construction could take a decade or more. Ontario has repeatedly asked Ottawa to help with the cost, which could be close to $2-billion.
Mr. Ford has made a push to extract critical minerals from the Ring of Fire a central theme for years. Recently, his government has pitched the Ring of Fire as an economic imperative in the face of U.S. tariffs.
But the plans have faced vocal opposition from some First Nations and environmental groups, lengthy environmental assessments and a federal regional impact assessment on the overall potential effects of mining in the area, which Mr. Ford has demanded be scrapped.
Even with the deals to be announced Thursday, Mr. Ford would not rule out using the new powers his government has granted itself in legislation known as Bill 5. The law, similar to Mr. Carney’s legislation for fast-tracking infrastructure known as Bill C-5, sparked condemnation from First Nations when it was passed earlier this year.
Ontario’s law allows the province to designate temporary “special economic zones,” where it could suspend any provincial or municipal law to speed up a project. The Premier had previously suggested he would designate the Ring of Fire as such a zone “as soon as possible.” He said Wednesday such a zone could still be needed in the region.
“Absolutely, because it moves things along a lot quicker. And we have to cut out red tape and regulations,” he said at an unrelated announcement in Toronto.
Two small First Nations near the Ring of Fire − Marten Falls and Webequie − have signed co-operation agreements with Ontario and support the project. They have led the years-long environmental assessments for segments of the road themselves. Mr. Ford said Wednesday he hoped development in the region would help young people in these communities.
Marten Falls Chief Bruce Achneepineskum said he hoped the latest deal between Ontario and Ottawa would reduce duplication between his own First Nation’s environmental assessments and the federal regional impact assessment, which includes 15 local First Nations, some of which oppose mining in the Ring of Fire.
“For us, it just meant sometimes, a rehashing of the same old studies that we are already doing,” Mr. Achneepineskum said in an interview. “I think that’s what Ontario and the feds are agreeing on.”
But he also said he supports that federal regional assessment, which he said could take another three years, adding that the other First Nations have a right to make their voices heard.
The letter on the Ring of Fire from IAAC, signed by president Terence Hubbard, says this federal regional review will continue but will not affect timelines for the road projects or “create any obligations on Ontario.”
Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, an umbrella group of 49 Northern Ontario Indigenous communities, said it’s disappointing that an agreement was made between Ontario and Canada “regarding our lands, and we had very little input into the process.”
Marten Falls and Webequie are members of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which also includes First Nations that oppose the Ring of Fire push. Mr. Fiddler, a critic of Mr. Ford’s Bill 5, said he respects the autonomy of Webequie and Marten Falls but that the Nishnawbe Aski Nation wants to have its say as well.
“We’re not opposed to streamlining any process, as long as it does not diminish any environmental protections that are there now, or that it does not diminish our rights,” he said.
This article was written by Tony Keller and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 16, 2025.
Canada creates 1.4 per cent of global emissions, versus more than 29 per cent for China. Since 2005, Canada’s emissions are down 8.5 per cent – behind schedule for a 40-per-cent drop by 2030.
How are the Liberals winning by promising to undo what they once promised to do, which itself was once a winner?
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.
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.
No other major oil-producing country has a policy of trying to keep oil in the ground, regardless of global demand.
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.
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.
Deal between Ottawa, Alberta would see ships navigate dangerous waters
This article was written by Ryan Tumilty and was published in the Toronto Star on December 15, 2025.
For most of the year, you can find Kevin Smith at the helm of his company’s 92foot sailboat, the Maple Leaf, guiding the centuryold luxury yacht around Haida Gwaii to show tourists the special place he has long called home.
But this time of year, Smith’s tourism company, Maple Leaf Adventures, keeps its three ships in port.
“There’s a really good reason that we don’t try to run our trips and our ships in November, December, January, February,” he said.
That reason appeared in the forecast last week as Environment Canada issued a red warning about strong winds with hurricanestrength gusts on the Hecate Strait, a notorious stretch of water between Haida Gwaii and the B.C. mainland.
A deal between the federal Liberals and Alberta’s government opens the door to allowing oil tankers on those same waters where Smith is taking tourists to view whales and the landscapes of the Great Bear Rainforest, creating a political storm alongside the real one.
Many B.C. Liberals have expressed serious reservations about ending the tanker ban, and the Conservatives attempted to wedge those MPs last week with a motion supporting a pipeline to the B.C. coast and ending the moratorium — a motion that was ultimately defeated.
The current oil tanker ban became law in 2019, but an informal moratorium had existed for decades. The law prevents oil tankers from docking, loading or unloading anywhere on the B.C. coast north of the tip of Vancouver Island.
American tankers travelling from Alaska to California pass outside the Hecate Strait in the open ocean on the west coast of Haida Gwaii.
A 1992 Environment Canada guidebook described the Hecate Strait as the most dangerous body of water in Canada, a fact regularly cited by opponents of tanker traffic.
Transport Canada did not confirm whether is still its view, but the waterways along the north coast feature strong waves, violent storms and powerful currents. Ships approaching the shoreline must take on experienced local pilots under existing laws, and there have been sinkings in the area.
The pipeline Alberta is pitching would carry oil from the oilsands to either the Port of Prince Rupert or the Port of Kitimat, both of which are covered by the existing tanker ban. The pipeline project has no proponent and no route, but the Alberta government is still shepherding it through regulatory hurdles and is expected to submit it to the federal major projects office next year. Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed in the deal with Alberta to amend the tanker ban if necessary to allow a project to proceed.
Smith said he has no doubt tanker crews would be welltrained professionals, but even skilled sailors face failures and sudden weather shifts on the north coast.
“You get two or three of those things happening on one bad day and now you’ve got an impossible situation,” he said. “It’s just the perfect storm of the wrong situations for these really large ships.”
After decades on the water, Smith has ridden out countless storms. His vessels, he said, are small enough to tuck into sheltered anchorages when the wind turns dangerous. Oil tankers, he noted, simply cannot do that.
Smith said, while the Strait is dangerous, that is not what most concerns him. He said getting to the open water would be the challenge for any tanker and it’s where he believes a catastrophe would happen.
“There are rocks and reefs and shoals on every single one of the entrances that they’re proposing using,” he said. “Whether it’s Kitimat or Prince Rupert it doesn’t matter, there’s rocks and reefs and shoals before you can get out to the more open water of Hecate Strait.”
Smith said the beauty of northern B.C. can’t be replaced if an oil tanker crashes causing catastrophic damage.
“I’m passionate about this coast. I lead trips here. Myself and my 70odd employees all rely on the beauty of this coast for our livelihood.”
Alberta’s proposal is expected to be similar to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project, which the Trudeau government cancelled in 2016. That proposal would have seen as many as 250 tankers dock at Kitimat every year to carry Alberta bitumen to Asia. Those ships, weighing as much as 320,000 tonnes, would have travelled down the Douglas Channel from Kitimat to the Hecate Strait before heading out to the open ocean.
If Alberta proposes Prince Rupert as a port instead, ships will head more directly through Dixon Entrance, a stretch of water north of Haida Gwaii that is also known for high winds and waves.
In 2012, multiple government agencies, including Transport Canada, the Coast Guard, and Environment Canada, reviewed Enbridge’s proposal and found it exceeded existing safety standards, but they did not conclude the project was without danger.
“While there will always be residual risk in any project, after reviewing the proponent’s studies and taking into account the proponent’s commitments, no regulatory concerns have been identified,” the report said.
Enbridge promised only newer, doublehulled oil tankers would be used. Ships would face regular inspections and would have tugboat escorts and experienced local pilots to bring them in safely.
The company found that as ports, either Prince Rupert or Kitimat could be used, but they found getting the pipeline to Prince Rupert would mean traversing steep mountains and narrow valleys.
“Pipelines constructed along these rivers would be exposed to challenging hydrotechnical issues and to avalanches and rock slides in the narrow valleys,” reads the company’s application.
In 2023, Norm Hann experienced the power of the Hecate Strait up close, traversing the width of the channel on a standup paddleboard.
Hann, who runs a company offering standup paddleboard tours, said finding weather calm enough for him and another boarder to cross the strait was nearly impossible.
“We looked at it every season for 10 years and it was only a handful of days you might have been able to cross on a paddle board.”
Hann said while they had clear weather for his trip across, they dealt with powerful currents that cut the speed he can usually travel suddenly in half. Hann said the weather around Haida Gwaii is in a constant state of change.
He protested Enbridge’s plans a decade ago said he still opposes tankers, because one day something will go wrong.
Gaagwiis, president of the Haida Nation, said the risk is just too great because a spill does irreversible damage.
“Zero risk is something that is impossible. There is no way to clean up an oil spill,” he said at a press conference in Ottawa where he also opposed the Conservatives motion. “We need to do everything we can to keep the crude oil out of those areas because of the fact that there is no way to avoid the risk.”
Coastal first nations including the Haida oppose any relaxation of the tanker ban’ Gaagwiis said it’s a matter of protecting their economy.
“We survive off of what the ocean provides so protecting the coast means also protecting thousands of jobs and hundreds of businesses and billions of dollars in economic value,” he said at a press conference in Ottawa Tuesday.
We need to do everything we can to keep the crude oil out of those areas because of the fact that there is no way to avoid the risk.
Tory leader says PM doesn’t want to build AlbertatoB.C. project
This article was written by Alex Ballingall and was published in the Toronto Star on December 10, 2025.
A partisan brouhaha over pipelines took over the House of Commons on Tuesday as the Liberal government grappled with Conservative attempts to paint it as an antidevelopment administration unwilling to support choice bits of its own energy accord with oilrich Alberta.
At issue was a nonbinding motion put forth by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who chided and ridiculed the governing Liberals on Tuesday, alleging their actions would show Prime Minister Mark Carney doesn’t really want a controversial new pipeline built through northern British Columbia to the Pacific coast. The project that would require lifting a ban on oil tankers that local First Nations and the provincial government insist must stay.
But Liberals responded by accusing Poilievre of advancing a juvenile ploy to score political points with a motion that purposely left out elements of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta the Conservatives don’t support, such as stronger industrial carbon pricing. The motion was defeated Tuesday evening, with the Liberals joining the opposition Bloc Québécois and NDP in rejecting it.
“A memorandum of understanding is not à la carte,” Carney said in French earlier Tuesday, in the Commons. “You must eat the entire meal, not only the meat.”
Throughout the day, Liberal cabinet ministers and MPs accused the opposition Conservatives of hijacking proceedings in the House to play political games. Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson described it as a “cheap political stunt.”
Shortly afterwards, Poilievre tried to increase pressure on the Liberals by changing the motion in what he billed as a “good faith” bid to broaden its appeal. He added to the motion references to the MOU’s support for the major Pathways Alliance carbon capture project, as well as the need to ensure Indigenous consultation and coownership of a new pipeline, along with engagement with the B.C. government that so far opposes the proposal.
“As we know with Liberals, they often start by making promises and then they go to making excuses,” Poilievre said.
“I’m going to help brush away those excuses for them. We’re going to amend our own motion in order to include the things the Liberals claim we left out.”
Liberals, however, stuck to their opposition, in part because the amended motion still excluded parts of the MOU, like the agreement to work on changes to industrial carbon pricing.
Poilievre decrying that policy Tuesday as a “massive, crippling carbon tax.”
Poilievre also questioned the Liberal logic, saying it makes no sense to champion an accord with Alberta and be reluctant to support any single part of it.
From the government benches, Liberal MP Corey Hogan — who represents a riding in Calgary and is parliamentary secretary to the natural resources minister — accused Poilievre of showing a lack of seriousness as a political leader.
“The very point” of his motion, Hogan charged, is to create division inside the governing party’s caucus. But he argued that it will simply create doubt about whether a new pipeline is possible, damaging the very goal the Conservatives have lauded for years.
“Rather than putting nation over party, they have put party over nation. To them, the motion is solely and exclusively a political strategy, because it serves no other purpose,” Hogan said.
Yet the government’s accord with Alberta has touched off concerns inside the Liberal caucus about a backtracking on federal climate policies. Hodgson was at pains Tuesday to paper over those concerns, claiming to reporters that — despite plain evidence to the contrary — all of the party’s MPs support the agreement.
Pressed by journalists if that applies to the whole group of MPs, Hodgson replied, “Yes.”
But there are clear statements from some members of the Liberal caucus that they don’t support the entire agreement. Steven Guilbeault, a Quebec MP and longtime environmentalist, resigned from Carney’s cabinet because of his opposition to the deal.
Victoria MP Will Greaves told Chek News on Vancouver Island last month that “I’m not supportive of a new pipeline. I’m very skeptical that there’s a business case to be made.”
Toronto MP Nathaniel ErskineSmith has also criticized the accord, saying Ottawa “gave up a lot — too much, probably, for any shortterm peace. It represents climate backsliding and a distraction from the ambition we need.”
And Patrick Weiler, a Liberal MP from Vancouver, has described the agreement in a video on social media as a “big setback” for climate policy.
The Assembly of First Nations has also called on the government to pull out of the deal, arguing it flies in the face of the need to obtain “free, prior and informed consent” from Indigenous Peoples.
The agreement includes federal support for at least one new oil pipeline carrying at least one million barrels of Alberta oil per day for export to Asian markets. It ties federal backing for such a project to the Pathways carbon capture project.
At the same time, the agreement commits Alberta and Ottawa to working on a new deal on industrial carbon pricing, to increase the “effective” price from below $20 per tonne of emissions to $130 per tonne.
The agreement also sees Ottawa scrapping the planned regulatory cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector, suspends incoming clean electricity regulations pending a deal on an alternate, and waters down a requirement for industry to reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas, methane.
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