* This article was originally published in The Kingston Crow on January 2, 2026. *
In voting for the Liberals, Canadians rejected the politics of climate change denialism, austerity, and the assault on minority rights and refugees represented by Pierre Poilievre.
But Mark Carney and the Liberals are giving us much the same – austerity for the people and profits for the wealthy, expansion of fossil fuel production that will fuel climate collapse, and contempt for Indigenous Treaty rights and migrant rights.
That is why people across Canada are speaking out against the policies and direction of the Carney Liberals. Here in Kingston, climate activists are picketing local MP Mark Gerretsen’s office on the third Friday of the month (from noon to 1pm). In 2023, Seniors for Climate Action Now! asked Gerretsen to support an emissions cap, and he agreed. We are coming back now to ask what happened to that and to demand climate action.
We (and Carney) know that extreme weather is caused by the excessive accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. We know that burning fossil fuels is a major source of carbon pollution. We know there are renewable clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels. And, we know that clean energy is more affordable than nuclear or fossil fuels.
Climate change and affordability are interlinked. Drought and extreme weather cause more crop failures, increase food insecurity and drive-up prices. Escalating insurance costs, damage and loss of property, impact housing and the cost of living. Heat pumps will heat and cool our homes more cheaply than a fossil fuel furnace or air conditioner. Wind and solar are the cheapest power. And, studies show that hydropower is one of the lowest-cost energy sources globally, providing stable power that reduces reliance on fluctuating fuel markets.
But the Liberal government has torn up almost every climate initiative brought in by the former Trudeau government in a few short months since taking office and is doubling down on more fossil fuel production. At the same time, it has introduced an austerity budget. This is a betrayal of the needs of Canadians, and a betrayal of a livable future for our children and grandchildren.
A tally of climate initiatives abandoned within a few short months by the Carney government includes:
- Passed Bill C-5 ‘Building Canada Act’ to allow government to override 12 laws and 7 regulations (including the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act), for projects designated ‘in the National Interest’. Bill C-5 mirrors the Ford Government’s Bill 5 that established ‘Special Economic Zones’ or what critics have called ‘Special Lawless Zones’ where economic interests may be pursued without the encumbrance of environmental protections or labour laws, potentially allowing suspension of basic worker protections and paving the way to violate Indigenous Treaty rights
- Ended the Greener Homes retrofit program and the Green Homes Loan Program, both of which provided supports to Canadians to electrify and improve household efficiency
- Scrapped Canada’s consumer carbon pricing system.
- Ended the Electric Vehicles (iZEV) program
- Clawed back Canada’s anti-greenwashing legislation protecting consumers from false and misleading disinformation (largely coming from the fossil fuel industry)
- Suspended Canada’s Green Electricity Regulations in Alberta
- Weakened methane regulations
- Scrapped the Oil and Gas Sector Emissions Cap
- Weakened the Alberta industrial carbon price from $170/tonnes (which it should have been if the federal government enforced its own policies) to $130/tonnes
- Ended Canada’s 2 Billion Trees program committed to planting two billion trees by 2031.
- Discussed possible ‘exemptions’ to the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act of 2019 without consulting those impacted, including Indigenous peoples or BC government
Is it any wonder that Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, who lead climate initiatives during the Trudeau administration, felt he had no option but to resign in November?
We must ask ourselves why Carney has abandoned all these initiatives? Why get rid of Canada’s anti-greenwashing legislation?
Mark Carney has been promoting ‘decarbonized oil’. To be clear, there is no such thing. This is a marketing ploy. In order to pursue fossil fuel expansion, the government is lying to Canadians – Carney is greenwashing. The tally of what has been abandoned shows the extent to which fossil fuel interests have captured government policy. News analysis of Mark Carney’s first 100 days show that the government was flooded with fossil fuel lobbyists.
The climate crisis is upon us. It is not an abstraction. It is not in a distant future. The past three years have all exceeded 1.5C of warming, the target set in the Paris accord, a target beyond which global warming threatens to set off cascading ‘tipping points’ as planetary boundaries are breached due to climate change.
Since 1992 countries around the world including Canada have recognized that burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) is dangerously heating the planet and that emergency action is required. Global warming will be increasingly devastating for humans, human societies, and for all of life; more deaths from extreme heat, more loss from wildfires and floods, more species extinction. This is not news to the government. Canada signed the Kyoto accord in 1997 recognizing the imminent dangers of climate warming.
Each year the list of climate disasters grows longer and more devastating. We are now seeing flood waters inundate southern B.C., Jamaicans are struggling with the devastation of a category 5 hurricane; and of the thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes because of wildfires across Canada this past summer, some are still in temporary shelters. A heat dome over Ontario and Quebec this summer caused punishing, record-shattering temperatures. Kingston experienced prolonged drought. Creeks, wetlands and streams dried up. Wells dried up. The Cataraqui Conservation Authority made a level 3 low water declaration, the highest level, indicating that the water supply was failing to meet demand. At the same time, the federal government is making cuts at Natural Resources Canada that will decimate wildfire and flood tracking capacity.
In 2024, according to The World Meteorological Organization, the global concentration of carbon dioxide jumped to 424 ppm, a level not reached for at least 800,000 years – some experts say for 3 million years. Antarctic ice core records show that CO2 concentrations ranged from 180 to 300 parts per million for at least 800,000 years. The great boreal forests of Canada have turned from being a carbon sink into a carbon emitter in the past decade.
This isn’t something to be measured only by grams of carbon – it is the difference between life and death.
Given that Canada is a well-to-do G-7 nation – surely this country should do its fair share to address carbon pollution. But Canada is far from doing so. Currently, Canada is in the top 10 worst carbon emitters on the planet. With Carney’s goal to ‘fast-track’ fossil fuel expansion Canada is heading to a dubious distinction of becoming even worse.
Looking at the major projects fast-tracked by the government, we need to consider the consequences for ordinary Canadians, for those struggling with the cost of living, for the poor, or for Indigenous people.
A Tale of LNG, MOUs and Pipelines
On day four of the world climate summit in Brazil, Prime Minister Carney announced that the Ksi Lisims liquified natural gas (LNG) facility will be fast tracked by government. This is in addition to an earlier announcement to double the capacity of the LNG facility at Kitimat BC. And a new transmission line and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Pipeline (PRGT) will also be fast-tracked to supply Ksi Lisims with power and gas. The PRGT will cut through the mountains and salmon rivers of BC just north of the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline. That pipeline was opposed by the Wet’suwet’en and environmental activists. Opposition to PRGT will be a similar story. Indigenous peoples have set up blockades against the PRGT’s construction and are seeking to have the PRGT’s environmental certificate revoked.
Neither the Ksi Lisims LNG nor the PRGT pipeline have received consent from affected First Nations, despite consent being a requirement under British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). There are legal challenges by two different Indigenous nations against Ksi Lisims.
Referring Ksi Lisims to the Major Projects Office to be ‘fast-tracked’ is a “blatant act of aggression,”according to Tara Marsden, Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, Wilp sustainability director, in an interviewwith Canada’s National Observer. “I don’t think it should be seen as anything other than that.”
While Trump bullies Canada, Carney bullies Indigenous Peoples.
There are a number of other complications, not least Ksi Lisims’ ownership group of MAGA-funding billionaires with Epstein connections. For a devastating account see satirists Juice Media’s mock PSA, entitled ‘Watch out, Canada!’.
Prime Minister Carney and the industry claim Canadian LNG is ‘green LNG’ or ‘net zero’. Since this LNG is for export, the carbon released in burning it will not count in Canada’s emissions. But the planet doesn’t care. The result is still a massive amount of carbon pollution. Expansion of the Kitimat LNG and the new Ksi Lisims LNG will almost quadruple LNG exports and would release over 110 megatons of carbon dioxide when burned. By comparison, that’s the same amount as was released by the wildfires in Canada in 2023.
Then there was the MOU with Alberta, which both promised a pipeline and eroded climate policy. In exchange for the Pipeline MOU the Federal government gave up an emissions cap, clean energy regulations, delayed methane reductions and indicated it would lift the federal oil tanker ban on the BC coast. All this bargaining by Carney with Alberta was, apparently, to get an improved industrial carbon price. Carney has claimed that the industrial carbon price would be as effective as an emission cap… that carbon pricing drives investment to low-carbon technology by making pollution more expensive. The Conservatives meanwhile shifted their attack from the consumer carbon tax to the industrial carbon tax. Within a week of signing the MOU, Alberta gutted industrial carbon pricing.
Or as a recent Sierra Club letter observed, this is how appeasement works: you give an inch to oil and gas interests and they’ll try to take the whole field.
Alberta also gets a 16.5 billion carbon capture and storage (CCS) project (another of Carney’s favoured policies) as part of the grand bargain. Pathways Alliance, the CCS megaproject developer (made up of the Petro giants: Canadian Natural, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Imperial and Suncor), forecast curbing emissions by 10 to 12 megatons a year on projects around Fort McMurray, the heart of the oilsands. Currently the oilsands emit about 70 megatons a year.
In a recent opinion piece in the Toronto Star, the author attempts to make the case that Carney’s plan “to make Canada an ‘energy superpower’ might just work to fight climate change”. The author claims that Pathways will capture some 16 tons of emission, “roughly equal to taking 90 per cent of Alberta’s cars and trucks off the road”!
And so, this is how Carney’s greenwashing sells Canada’s ‘decarbonized oil’ to the world. Pathways Alliance formed in 2021. So far they have built nothing and captured zero carbon. But supposing that it is built and does capture 10 or 16 tons of emissions (depending on what source you believe) this is only a portion of the emissions from production. The emissions from burning the exported oil are not included. Looking at 2024 statistics, if all of Canada’s oil and gas exports at current levels were burned, a rough estimate of emissions is 939 megatons of CO2. These exported emissions will accelerate climate breakdown.
And for the people of Alberta, CCS will use an excessive amount of water. According to a recent study, by 2050 the Pathways project water use will be “an annual usage of 5.9 billion litres from the Beaver River basin system, which is projected to have only nine billion litres of reserve in dry years — a volume that is dropping rapidly due to climate change-driven drought”.
Environmental Destruction and Disinformation
Many question if a new pipeline is even feasible – but the point is that Carney is driving a national message and agenda on expanding fossil fuels instead of a national discussion on a transition to renewable energy. In addition to new LNG and oil and gas pipelines, he has also promised expansion of AI data centres and the military in line with the priorities of the Trump administration – all of which guarantees that we are going to be more dependent on fossil fuels.
Rather than a planned transition to renewable energy – we are faced with disinformation, obstruction, and an uncertain and destructive fossil fuel future.
In whose interest is this really? Oil and gas jobs decline even when production increases. The sector is now less than 1% of Canadian employment while clean energy jobs surge elsewhere, globally. According to Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, “LNG’s short-term, mostly temporary jobs come with long-term devastating climate costs that lock in fossil fuel use for decades” and “The majority of LNG profits flow to multinational corporations, not local communities.” LNG expansion on the west coast is not a significant job creator, and is opposed by Indigenous communities in B.C. Lifting the ban on oil tankers is not worth the risk to the environment, the local economies, and the food supply of the Indigenous peoples of the region.
Carney and the Liberals should actually listen to Canadians – polling shows that Canadians overwhelmingly prefer renewable energy to oil and gas development. Renewable energy could be a real unifying force.
So who is Carney listening to? According to a recent Sierra Club of Canada message, “Mark Carney has been taking speech ideas from billionaire-funded ‘Build Canada’ linked to oil and gas interests and to tech entrepreneur and CEO of Shopify Tobias Lütke who famously said that Canada should not ‘hit back’ in response to US tariffs and characterized Trump’s demands as reasonable.” The Sierra Club article references Trumps 2025 ‘National Security Strategy’ which “mentions the oil and gas and tech sectors as tools for expanding U.S. influence and specifically declares climate action in other countries as a threat to U.S. dominance.”
The Carney Liberals’ democracy-destroying actions – such as Bill C-5; their abandonment of climate policies, their greenwashing promotion of ‘decarbonized oil’ and ‘green LNG’, coupled with an austerity budget which makes cuts even as Canadians are struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their heads -– will cost millions of lives from climate change and does not address the real problems Canadians face.
We must reject so-called ‘nation building’ projects that lead us to planetary destruction. Instead, Canada must work to improve peoples’ lives and protect the natural world. Canada must move away from an economy based on fossil fuels to a low carbon caring economy that puts people and nature first. In doing so, Canada must recognize the fundamental rights of Indigenous peoples and strive to create a caring economy.
But it is clear that the federal government will not prioritize people and the planet over profits without pressure from all of us. We need to build political pressure on the federal government to redirect economic priorities. This is a critical moment and a time to make our voices heard.
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Nancy Nicol, Professor Emerita York University, has a long history in research, documentary film and human rights. She is a member of Seniors for Climate Action Now! in Kingston. In 2025, she completed the documentary film Later is Too Late.
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