Canada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy

Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.

First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.

The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.

On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.

There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.

That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.

The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.

The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.

Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.

In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.

Author:

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Related Topics:#CanadaEconomy #CanadaEnergy #FraserInstitute #RossMcKitrick CanadaEnvironment ClimateChangePolicy feature

Up Next

Musk Reveals To Tucker Why He Thinks 2024 Will Be Last Election If Dems Win

Don't Miss

Free Money? What a UBI Would Really Do to People … and the National Debt

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

The Digital Services Tax Q&A: “It was going to be complicated and messy”

International / 6 hours ago

Elon Musk forms America Party after split with Trump

Daily Caller / 15 hours ago

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Resets The Energy Policy Playing Field

Carbon Tax

Canada’s Carbon Tax Is A Disaster For Our Economy And Oil Industry

Published on July 5, 2025

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Lee Harding exposes the truth behind Canada’s sky-high carbon tax—one that’s hurting our oil industry and driving businesses away. With foreign oil paying next to nothing, Harding argues this policy is putting Canada at a major economic disadvantage. It’s time to rethink this costly approach.

Our sky-high carbon tax places Canadian businesses at a huge disadvantage and is pushing investment overseas

No carbon tax will ever satisfy global-warming advocates, but by most measures, Canada’s carbon tax is already too high.

This unfortunate reality was brought to light by Resource Works, a B.C.-based non-profit research and advocacy organization. In March, one of their papers outlined the disproportionate and damaging effects of Canada’s carbon taxes.

The study found that the average carbon tax among the top 20 oil-exporting nations, excluding Canada, was $0.70 per tonne of carbon emissions in fiscal 2023. With Canada included, that average jumps to $6.77 per tonne.

At least Canada demands the same standards for foreign producers as it does for domestic ones, right? Wrong.

Most of Canada’s oil imports come from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, none of which impose a carbon tax. Only 2.8 per cent of Canada’s oil imports come from the modestly carbon-taxing countries of the U.K. and Colombia.

Canada’s federal consumer carbon tax was $80 per tonne, set to reach $170 by 2030, until Prime Minister Mark Carney reduced it to zero on March 14. However, parallel carbon taxes on industry remain in place and continue to rise.

Resource Works estimates Canada’s effective carbon tax at $58.94 per tonne for fiscal 2023, while foreign oil entering Canada had an effective tax of just $0.30 per tonne.

“This results in a 196-fold disparity, effectively functioning as a domestic tariff against Canadian oil production,” the research memo notes. Forget Donald Trump—Ottawa undermines our country more effectively than anyone else.

Canada is responsible for 1.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions, but the study estimates that Canada paid one-third of all carbon taxes in 2023. Mexico, with nearly the same emissions, paid just $3 billion in carbon taxes for 2023-24, far less than Canada’s $44 billion.

Resource Works also calculated that Canada alone raised the global per-tonne carbon tax average from $1.63 to $2.44. To be Canadian is to be heavily taxed.

Historically, the Canadian dollar and oil and gas investment in Canada tracked the global price of oil, but not anymore. A disconnect began in 2016 when the Trudeau government cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline and banned tanker traffic on B.C.’s north coast.

The carbon tax was introduced in 2019 at $15 per tonne, a rate that increased annually until this year. The study argues this “economic burden,” not shared by the rest of the world, has placed Canada at “a competitive disadvantage by accelerating capital flight and reinforcing economic headwinds.”

This “erosion of energy-sector investment” has broader economic consequences, including trade balance pressures and increased exchange rate volatility.

According to NASA, Canadian forest fires released 640 million metric tonnes of carbon in 2023, four times the amount from fossil fuel emissions. We should focus on fighting fires, not penalizing our fossil fuel industry.

Carney praised Canada’s carbon tax approach in his 2021 book Value(s), raising questions about how long his reprieve will last. He has suggested raising carbon taxes on industry, which would worsen Canada’s competitive disadvantage.

In contrast, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre argued that extracting and exporting Canadian oil and gas could displace higher-carbon-emitting energy sources elsewhere, helping to reduce global emissions.

This approach makes more sense than imposing disproportionately high tax burdens on Canadians. Taxes won’t save the world.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Business

Canada’s loyalty to globalism is bleeding our economy dry

Published on July 4, 2025

Todayville

This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Sylvain Charlebois

Trump’s controversial trade policies are delivering results. Canada keeps playing by global rules and losing

U.S. President Donald Trump’s brash trade agenda, though widely condemned, is delivering short-term economic results for the U.S. It’s also revealing the high cost of Canada’s blind loyalty to globalism.

While our leaders scold Trump and posture on the world stage, our economy is faltering, especially in sectors like food and farming, which have been sacrificed to international agendas that don’t serve Canadian interests.

The uncomfortable truth is that Trump’s unapologetic nationalism is working. Canada needs to take note.

Despite near-universal criticism, the U.S. economy is outperforming expectations. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects 3.8 per cent second-quarter GDP growth.

Inflation remains tame, job creation is ahead of forecasts, and the trade deficit is shrinking fast, cut nearly in half. These results suggest that, at least in the short term, Trump’s economic nationalism is doing more than just stirring headlines.

Canada, by contrast, is slipping behind. The economy is contracting, manufacturing is under pressure from shifting U.S. trade priorities, and food
inflation is running higher than general inflation. One of our most essential sectors—agriculture and food production—is being squeezed by rising costs, policy burdens and vanishing market access. The contrast with the U.S. is striking and damning.

Worse, Canada had been pushed to the periphery. The Trump administration had paused trade negotiations with Ottawa over Canada’s proposed digital services tax. Talks have since resumed after Ottawa backed away from implementing it, but the episode underscored how little strategic value
Washington currently places on its relationship with Canada, especially under a Carney-led government more focused on courting Europe than securing stable access to our largest export market. But Europe, with its own protectionist agricultural policies and slower growth, is no substitute for the scale and proximity of the U.S. market. This drift has real consequences, particularly for
Canadian farmers and food producers.

The problem isn’t a trade war; it’s a global realignment. And while Canada clings to old assumptions, Trump is redrawing the map. He’s pulling back from institutions like the World Health Organization, threatening to sever ties with NATO, and defunding UN agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the global body responsible for coordinating efforts to improve food security and support agricultural development worldwide. The message is blunt: global institutions will no longer enjoy U.S. support without measurable benefit.

To some, this sounds reckless. But it’s forcing accountability. A senior FAO official recently admitted that donors are now asking hard questions: why fund these agencies at all? What do they deliver at home? That scrutiny is spreading. Countries are quietly realigning their own policies in response, reconsidering the cost-benefit of multilateralism. It’s a shift long in the making and long resisted in Canada.

Nowhere is this resistance more damaging than in agriculture. Canada’s food producers have become casualties of global climate symbolism. The carbon tax, pushed in the name of international leadership, penalizes food producers for feeding people. Policies that should support the food and farming sector instead frame it as a problem. This is globalism at work: a one-size-fits-all policy that punishes the local for the sake of the international.

Trump’s rhetoric may be provocative, but his core point stands: national interest matters. Countries have different economic structures, priorities and vulnerabilities.

Pretending that a uniform global policy can serve them all equally is not just naïve, it’s harmful. America First may grate on Canadian ears, but it reflects a reality: effective policy begins at home.

Canada doesn’t need to mimic Trump. But we do need to wake up. The globalist consensus we’ve followed for decades is eroding. Multilateralism is no longer a guarantee of prosperity, especially for sectors like food and farming. We must stop anchoring ourselves to frameworks we can’t influence and start defining what works for Canadians: secure trade access, competitive food production, and policy that recognizes agriculture not as a liability but as a national asset.

If this moment of disruption spurs us to rethink how we balance international cooperation with domestic priorities, we’ll emerge stronger. But if we continue down our current path, governed by symbolism, not strategy, we’ll have no one to blame for our decline but ourselves.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country