Canada's premiers should tread more carefully on climate policy

National Observer

24-07-2025

In a year of unexpected political developments, one of the biggest surprises so far has been the unusual degree of harmony between Ottawa and the premiers. Wab Kinew, David Eby, and Francois Legault have been making unusually peaceful noises about their relationship with Ottawa, ones that got turned up a few notches at this week's first ministers' meeting in Huntsville, Ontario. Heck, even Danielle Smith and Scott Moe have managed not to look completely petulant at times.
But when it comes to their obvious fondness for Mark Carney, nobody comes close to Doug Ford. 'The prime minister is the most humble person you'd ever want to meet,' Ford told reporters on Tuesday after letting it slip that Carney had stayed at his chalet. 'He listens, he's a smart business person. … He's a very good man, and he just wants the best for Canada.' Wherever Pierre Poilievre was at the time — and it wasn't the Alberta riding where he's trying to win a byelection — he must have been doing enough fuming to heat a small village.
Even so, a return to Canada's regularly scheduled political programming seems inevitable, if not yet imminent. When that happens, it will almost certainly have something to do with climate change — and the federal government's continued insistence on doing something about it. The recent joint letter penned by Ford and Smith to federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin offers a window into what that conflict will look like. The letter calls for the immediate repeal of the clean electricity regulations, the Impact Assessment Act, the oil and gas emissions cap and the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, along with an amendment to the Species at Risk Act that would supposedly respect the constitutional jurisdiction of the provinces.
In other words, they want the federal government to withdraw almost every meaningful climate policy and regulation it has put forward since 2015. The letter from the two premiers builds on the memorandum of understanding signed between their provinces in June (which Saskatchewan recently signed onto) that called for, among other things, the repeal of the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act. As Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz — yes, environment minister — said on social media, 'these policies undermine competitiveness, delay project development, kill investment and disproportionately harm provincial economies without any benefits to Canada's environment.'
The last point is both obviously false and deeply ironic given the source, but it's also a deliberate distraction. What these premiers really want, what they always want in the end, is a federal government that doesn't do anything more ambitious than send them their transfer payments. They want it to stay in a narrowly-drawn constitutional lane, and they very much want it to stay out of the effort to address climate change — even after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it was, in fact, in its lane.
For all of his enthusiasm for getting infrastructure projects built, Carney isn't about to surrender to the provinces here. The very idea of a docile and submissive federal government is fundamentally at odds with the vision he's laid out for Canadians, in which the federal government spends more on its military, pushes harder for national economic infrastructure like electricity grids and pipelines, and otherwise acts decisively in the national interest. It's a vision Canadians endorsed in April's federal election, and one they seem even more enthusiastic about almost three months after the ballots were counted.
It's also a clear contrast to the last Liberal government, which talked a good game around national issues and objectives and then consistently failed to actually defend them. As I wrote in a column earlier this year, 'if there's an overarching criticism of Justin Trudeau as prime minister that will outlast the short-term griping about his style or specific policy failures, it will be his failure to stand up more fully for Canada. On any number of fronts, from his government's numerous concessions to the jurisdictional encroachment coming from Quebec to its inability to forcefully denounce creeping Alberta separatism, Trudeau has routinely declined to defend the national interest.'
Premiers like Danielle Smith and Doug Ford are demanding that Ottawa drop all of its climate-related policies. Why they're picking a fight with Mark Carney that they might not be able to win.
It seems unlikely that Carney will make the same mistake — or fail to learn from it. If anything, one of the early signatures of his tenure as prime minister has been a willingness to jettison Trudeau-era policies and programs if they're unpopular or ineffective. Yes, he's willing to fast-track major infrastructure projects, at some inevitable environmental cost, in an effort to stimulate Canada's economy and reduce our dependence on the United States. But he's not about to trade in his core belief in the importance of addressing climate change — and the economic risks that are both created and multiplied if we don't.
The premiers will find that out in due course. Whether they decide to fight Carney on a hill whose contours he knows instinctively depends on their own political calculations and concerns. Alberta and Saskatchewan will almost certainly try to use Carney as a scapegoat for their own failures the way they did so effectively with Justin Trudeau, if only because they have so many of them to distract voters from. But the new boss very clearly isn't the same as the old one, both in style and substance. Just ask Doug Ford.