By Dan McTeague

Ever since Mark Carney’s rise to power, people have been trying to sell me on the idea that he’s just what this country needs — a (supposedly) practical, no-nonsense businessman who can clean up the mess his highly-ideological predecessor, Justin Trudeau, left us in. To reinforce this claim, they point to the constant rumblings about Carney’s commitment to building new oil and gas pipelines in Canada.

I’m sorry, folks, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Now, building new pipelines is an understandably popular idea. Construction alone would be a serious job creator. New pipelines would enable us to further capitalize on our abundant natural resources. They would pump up the domestic oil and gas supply, bringing down the cost of energy for families and businesses alike, thereby invigorating our economy and fortifying the Loonie.

They would also reinforce national unity at a time when that is being sorely tested.

Green propaganda has created and increasingly widened ideological divides over the resource sector, still the backbone of our economy. Our thriving activist class are happy to exploit these divisions and to do whatever they can to kill new resource projects before they get off the ground. Over time, this has made it just plain easier to sell Canadian fossil fuels to the US, which has been happy to take them off our hands.

Make no mistake, if we made good use of this period of unfortunately high tensions with our cousins to the south, by beefing up our energy infrastructure and fortifying our economy, which would ultimately make us a more attractive trading partner, I’d be all for it.

That said, anyone who believes that Carney is fully committed to new pipelines should revisit what he’s actually said on the matter. They would discover that he has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on pipelines since the moment he stepped out from behind the curtain and publicly took the reins of the Liberal Party. He’s been purposely vague when talking to pipeline-sympathetic crowds out west, and explicitly reassuring when speaking to anti-pipeline crowds elsewhere, saying things like “I would never impose [a pipeline] on Quebec.”

Which should surprise no one! Mark Carney is still Mark Carney. From his banking career to his time at the megafirm Brookfield, from his role as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Leadership and Finance to founding the (now collapsed) Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), he has spent his entire career working towards a net-zero global economy, no matter how disastrous this would be for the world generally and Canada specifically.

Carney himself described his magnum opus, GFANZ, as being “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net-zero.” The same could be said about Carney himself.

Which is to say, though he is more sophisticated, Carney is no less of a “Green” ideologue than Justin Trudeau.

“But, but, but!” I can hear people saying, “He saved us from the carbon tax!”

To which I answer: No, he did not. A longtime apostle of carbon taxation generally, and of Trudeau’s carbon tax specifically, Carney’s main issue with the carbon tax was that it had become “too divisive” — meaning we had noticed its effect on our lives and started complaining about it. To fix that, he used what amounted to an accounting trick to hide it from our view.

Meanwhile, he remains committed to all of his party’s environmentalist legislation and regulations, including the Clean Fuel Standard, which jacks up the ethanol content of our gasoline, while progressively raising the price per litre; Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which significantly reduces our ability to export our natural resources; Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental positives of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard; and the egregious Electric Vehicle mandate, which forces us to buy, starting next year, cars which are poorly suited for our climate, geography, and lifestyle, and for which we simply do not have the infrastructure.

And, most pertinent to this discussion, Mark Carney remains committed to Bill C-69, the “No More Pipelines Act,” which even the Supreme Court said overstepped the federal government’s constitutional authority.

So despite all of their advantages, Mark Carney’s decades of net-zero commitments make the chances of us actually getting a single new pipeline out of this government extremely remote, probably nonexistent.

I’d love to be wrong. I don’t think I am.