Q&A: What Canada's Election Means for Climate Action and Ties With Europe-Amid Trump-Era Tensions

Canada Standard

26-04-2025

Canadians across six time zones go to the polls April 28 in a high-stakes federal election that will shape the country's climate and energy policy and its response to economic warfare and annexation threats issued by U.S. president Donald Trump. With just days to go, the Liberal Party under Mark Carney holds a solid lead. Carney has pledged to develop both clean and low-carbon conventional energy and advance carbon border policies. His main opponent, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, has promised to roll back several climate policies introduced by previous Liberal governments and expand fossil fuel exports. The election outcome will determine whether Canada doubles down on pitching new oil and gas projects to Europe and Asia or becomes a partner in a new clean energy trading bloc.
This Q&A is part of a cooperation between The Energy Mix and Clean Energy Wire , Europe's leading platform for collaborative and solution-oriented climate and energy journalism, to better connect the climate and energy stories from Europe and Canada.
Led by the Conservatives, Canada would prioritize fossil fuel expansion and ease regulations to support oil and gas. Under the Liberals, it would lean toward stronger clean energy partnerships and trade alignment with global allies-including through emissions abatement in the oil and gas sector, without production cuts.
Carney has backed Canada's climate commitments and is expected to carry forward most of former prime minister Justin Trudeau's clean energy and climate policies. From 2015 to 2025, Trudeau's Liberal government introduced dozens of climate, energy efficiency, and renewable energy measures and set out to strengthen environmental impact assessment. At the same time, the government spent billions of dollars to nationalize, then subsidize the controversial Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion, supported expanded exports of Canadian fossil fuels, and joined some provincial governments in encouraging and subsidizing new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. While Canada's natural gas exports currently flow almost entirely to the U.S. via pipeline, its first LNG shipments to Asia are expected by mid-2025.
Trudeau's flagship consumer carbon tax introduced in 2019 was designed to put a price on pollution while rebating more money to most Canadians than they paid out through higher prices. But the policy was complicated and its rollout was a major communications failure. As a result, the Conservative Party and its allies in some provincial governments were able to turn the carbon tax into a lightning rod for controversy. While the consumer carbon tax was withdrawn April 1 2025, a separate industrial carbon tax is still in place and widely seen as a cornerstone of any future effort to align Canada's trade strategy and climate policies with partners outside North America.
Through it all, Canada is only barely on track to meet its 2030 emission reduction targets, and remains a leading fossil fuel exporter amid growing global pressure to phase out fossil fuels. Public opinion supports nature conservation and new fossil fuel pipelines side by side, although climate has receded as a top polling issue in the face of the affordability crisis and now Trump's explicit threats to Canada's status as an independent nation. The election will determine the ground on which these policy battles are fought.
Carney would expand incentives for electric vehicles and home retrofits. He backs a carbon border adjustment aligning Canada with trade partners like the European Union and would keep the Trudeau government's long-delayed emissions cap on oil and gas, while working with industry to meet climate targets-including by supporting carbon capture and storage (CCS) development. His proposed trade and energy corridor includes ports, rail, airports, highways, and critical mineral mining, but no new oil pipelines-though he has previously supported them. In a televised leaders' debate April 17, he specifically expressed support for CCS and small modular nuclear reactors as elements of a low-carbon future.
Liberal leader Mark Carney promises a "Canada Strong" program to grow the economy while tackling climate change, earning support from green advocates. But his pragmatic stance has led some to question where he stands on key issues. He once praised Trudeau's consumer carbon tax, then cancelled it when it became politically divisive. His focus is now on tightening carbon markets for industrial polluters and giving companies more price certainty to drive investments in emissions abatement.
View our latest digests
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre vowed to axe Trudeau's widely unpopular consumer carbon tax, but that central campaign promise was blunted when Trudeau resigned and incoming PM Mark Carney eliminated the tax himself.
Poilievre now promises to go further by ending carbon pricing for industrial polluters and cancelling the oil and gas emissions cap. His plan to "unleash" Canadian resources involves repealing the federal Impact Assessment Act -a Trudeau-era law that mandates environmental, health, social, and economic assessments, including consideration of Indigenous rights-before approving major resource projects. Instead, Poilievre backs faster approvals along pre-approved corridors for pipelines and power lines.
RELATED STORY: 'Kind of Shocking': Election Result Could Make Canada the Only G7 Country with Rising Emissions
Indigenous leader Savanna McGregor, Grand Chief of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council, warned that plan would "nearly paralyze" project development if it failed to uphold the constitutional requirement to consult Indigenous communities before approving major infrastructure-a right rooted in Canada's recognition of Indigenous peoples as distinct nations with title to their lands. Some coastal Indigenous groups are preparing to fight Poilievre's plan to scrap a law that bans oil tankers from environmentally sensitive parts of Canada's west coast, legislation that the oil industry argues is restricting export opportunities.
Based on polling throughout the campaign, none of the three other parties in the House of Commons-the Bloc Quebecois, the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP), or the Green Party of Canada-will have any chance of forming Canada's next government. Any or all of them could have significant influence in a minority Parliament, but at the moment all signs point to a majority Liberal government.
Among the three, the Bloc has been the most consistent voice against new oil and gas pipelines, tapping into public opinion in Quebec that favours decisive climate action more than in any other province. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the only one to discuss climate impacts and climate despair in the leaders' televised debate. The Green Party is very small in Canada; it currently holds two seats in Parliament, and is at risk of losing one of them.
Trump's threats have completely transformed the dynamic in this election.
In early January, Trudeau had been in office for nearly a decade, his popularity across the country had cratered, and the opposition Conservative Party was running 25 points ahead of the Liberals in pre-election polling. Trudeau announced his resignation January 6, and Mark Carney-the former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, credited with guiding Canada through the 2008 economic crash and the UK through Brexit-was sworn in March 14 after winning the Liberal leadership at a party convention.
The federal election campaign began days later. For years, Poilievre had been campaigning on his promise to "axe the tax" (which Carney did almost immediately) and a deeply personal vilification of Trudeau and some of his top cabinet ministers.
But now, the top ballot question is who can best defend Canada's economy and sovereignty from Trump-who imposed a 25% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum, pledged to crush car manufacturing in Canada, issued shifting trade threats that triggered recession fears, and repeatedly joked (or not) that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. As of April 19, polling aggregator 338Canada showed the Liberals leading the Conservatives 43% to 38%, a five-point margin that-if reflected in the election results-would likely provide the Liberals with enough seats to form a government.
Canada's fossil fuel industry received Poilievre's enthusiastic backing after it launched a massive public relations push framing new pipelines and looser regulations as key to protecting the economy and sovereignty from Trump. Some opinion polls show support for new pipelines. While Carney is being vague about pipelines, senior Liberal cabinet ministers have pointed out that there is no private sector proponent to build one, and the coming decline in global fossil fuel demand would ultimately turn any new fossil infrastructure into an expensive stranded asset.
In 2015, shortly after he was first elected, Trudeau travelled to the Paris climate conference to declare, "Canada is back, my friends. We're here to help." The policy decisions that followed, along with Trudeau's appointment of an environment and climate change minister who had attended every United Nations climate summit since COP 1 in various roles, helped solidify Canada's standing as a constructive voice in international climate diplomacy.
Although the election will determine the "direction of travel", as COP negotiators like to say, for Canada's international climate policies, those issues haven't been addressed in any depth in the course of the election. But a Liberal government under Mark Carney would be far more likely to stay the course than a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre.
During the Liberal Party leadership campaign, Carney talked about building new alliances with like-minded countries and hinted at a carbon border adjustment tax (CBAM) that would essentially serve as a tariff against high-carbon imports.
While the election campaign has largely focused on domestic issues, the Liberals staged a windy photo op April 18 in the iconic border city of Niagara Falls, where Carney accused Trump of "rupturing-literally rupturing-the global economy".
Of all the party leaders, Carney has been most vocal about moving beyond Canada's economic dependence on the United States and building wider, more diversified trading relationships. In the course of the campaign, there has been a good deal of public debate about what a new, low-carbon trading bloc might look like, with the EU, the United Kingdom, and Canada joined in various scenarios by Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, or Australia.
There have been no public indications that any of Canada's party leaders have been actively involved in those discussions, although Carney travelled to Europe during his first week as Prime Minister for high-level meetings with "reliable allies" like France and the UK. There has been some expectation that Carney's past international profile as governor of the Bank of England and UN special envoy for climate finance will raise the potential and the expectation for Canada to step up more concretely if the Liberals win the election.
Poilievre has struggled to differentiate his policies and public persona from Trump's and to coherently critique the U.S. administration's economic warfare and annexation threats. That's partly because the small proportion of Canadians who support Trump, including the 10% or less who are prepared to consider annexation, are at the heart of the Conservatives' political base. During the leaders' debate, Poilievre said he would address climate change by exporting more liquefied natural gas, presumably as a replacement for coal, to countries like India. The emissions footprint of gas is not widely understood in Canada, but its primary component is methane-a climate super-pollutant with 84 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control.
These differences in policy and approach will also come into play when Canada hosts the next G7 leaders' summit in Kananaskis, Alberta June 15-17. "This year will be an opportunity for Canada to demonstrate our leadership and advance meaningful dialogue, collective action, and innovative solutions, for the benefit of all peoples," Canada's G7 website currently states.
Canada is a federation made up of a national government, 10 provinces, and three territories. On April 28, Canadians will vote for the 343 members of the House of Commons, each of whom will represent a geographic constituency. The 105 seats in Canada's appointed Senate are not affected by this month's vote.
The Prime Minister, who serves as the head of government, is the leader of the party that holds the majority of seats in the House of Commons. If no party wins at least 172 seats in the April 28 election, the party with the most seats has the first opportunity to form a functioning government by negotiating for support from smaller parties. This can be through a formal but time-limited coalition.
While the federal government has jurisdiction to regulate pollution and interprovincial or international trade, the provinces hold-and often loudly assert-their authority over natural resources, including oil, gas, and coal.
Source: The Energy Mix