Federal minister leaves, on principle

Steven Guilbeault’s resignation from the federal cabinet shows the limits of Liberal climate-change policy.

The former minister of Canadian identity and culture cited his “profound disagreement” with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s climate policy direction for leaving. The Canada/Alberta memorandum of understanding, signed last week, was the last straw. That memorandum pledged not to apply the federal oil and gas emissions cap, clean electricity regulations, or the tanker ban should a new pipeline to British Columbia come to fruition. Guilbeault was an architect of each of these policies as a former environment and climate change minister.

As far as cabinet resignations go, this one was at least more principled than tawdry. No scandal, no doubts accompanied the reasons why he quit. It kept to the principle of cabinet solidarity, which means that no minister can remain in cabinet while publicly disagreeing with government policy. That was a principle too far for the former environmental and climate activist. He could not agree, so he could not stay.

Crafting durable climate policy is no easy feat. The long-term climate cycle pays no attention to the short-term electoral cycle. The political costs of “now” outweighs the climate benefits of “later.” To align the cycles, voters need to buy into a societal version of “paying it forward.” That form of climate consensus has always been lacking across Canada.

The cabinet cross too heavy to bear for Guilbeault was that the climate policy changes were coming from his own team. That stings but pales against the climate policy changes that would have been made by a Conservative government had Carney not come along and saved the Liberal party’s dismal fortunes. Fortunes that had declined, in part, from the very policies Guilbeault championed.

Yet, he and his government had a decade in power to help forge a societal consensus to keep acting on climate change. All at a time when 195 countries around the world adopted the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement on Climate Change.

For Canada, that meant reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030. Are we on track to do so? No. We weren’t before the Canada/Alberta memorandum was signed and we won’t be afterwards. But Guilbeault now says the deal with Alberta means it will be “impossible” to reach the 2030 target. “I think that my government needs to be honest with Canadians,” he said about not meeting climate targets.

This is rich. Canada signed on to every international climate plan from Kyoto to Paris and since. We’ve had domestic GHG reduction plans under four Liberal governments and two Conservative governments since 1990. None has achieved its goals.

Ambition trumped reality in every case. None more so than under the Liberal government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau and Guilbeault. They set out to transform the economy as a necessary condition to meet international climate targets. Given Canada’s carbon profile as a fossil fuel producer and emitter, this meant an enveloping form of top-down industrial policy statism that began to seep into every crook, cranny and crevice of economic activity. There was simply no way to meet a net-zero carbon emitting goal as a nation unless as much of our economy as possible was tethered to a new way of carbon-free living.

This was never going to be anything but hard and expensive. Achieving this with the required economic and social trade-offs needed to stay the course long-term was never part of the government’s “honesty.” Missing targets became routine. Yet, the demand from on-high was always “we need to do more.” More meant ever-increasing carbon prices on business, costs on consumers and disruption for workers. Meanwhile, the economic cycle turned down and climate concerns by voters went south with it. This temporal reality too often eludes the climate-committed who seek a doubling-down.

Climate policy in Canada has become a never-ending, ever-rising scaffold of policies, programs, actions and targets. It has become coercive not collaborative in a country forged by compromise with a strong division of powers between orders of government. With much of the heavy lifting on actual carbon reductions needing to come from provinces, the federal government opted for the imposition of top-down frameworks, laws and backstops, cloaked in cooperation but more truly emulating Henry Ford’s famous car-selling dictum of, “any colour the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”

Until now. Carney is shifting the climate policy burden from formulaic to meet an impossible target to pragmatic to meet plausible results. Make no mistake. This will still mean carbon emissions reductions. More through some measures, like industrial carbon pricing, but less from others, like clean electricity regulations. The prime minister is creating a “made-in-Canada” orientation that is more realistic and achievable than a “made-in-Paris” demand that is ambitious but impossible.

Until Canada has an honest conversation about how to prosper through climate change, we will keep setting dishonest agreements on the way we are doing it.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.