Photo: SCAN! member Jamie Swift at Kingston’s weekly Fridays for the Future noon rally. He hadn’t even heard by then that Cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie is pulling down $10,391,189 a year.
It is difficult to ignore the hard-faced arrogance Canadians witnessed last month.
One business bullhorn who manages Alberta’s tar sands eco-catastrophe blurted out his feelings about government energy policies: Too much of this climate talk.
Cenovus Energy boss Jon McKenzie veered from the script during an earnings call. (Cenovus’s 2026 first quarter earnings were $1.6 billion, up 82 per cent from the same period in 2025). He claimed that public policy has amounted to a “myopic dialogue” that’s been “focused on the climate agenda and climate policy.”
Mark Carney’s scorn for excessive climate anxiety had already been clarified. The Liberal government hacksaw had obliterated carbon pricing, the fossil fuel emission cap and the electric vehicle mandate.
Carney has since proceeded to slash environmental protection laws. Weakening environmental protection laws and protections for species at risk. Borrowing from Doug Ford’s playbook: Making sure ministers can pre-approve mega-projects with no proper assessments. Creating federal economic zones where environmental rules are sacrificed.
Anyway, what’s wrong with strip-mining the Rockies eastern slope, calling it the bucolic-sounding Grassy Mountain project, so an Australian outfit can get at the coal and ship it out of the country? Alberta’s Corb Lund disagrees. Asked about the letter to him from fourteen Liberal caucus members expressing concern over the government’s apparent commitment to frying the planet, Carney scoffed, “There’s 160 other members of that caucus.”
One fewer just before month’s end. Former Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, the greenest Liberal, resigned his parliamentary seat. Appalled by the government’s sellout to Alberta’s pipeline demand, he had already quit the Cabinet. The Carney government’s track record on the environment has only worsened.
Connecting the Dots?
If you find all off this hard to swallow, I recommend taking a look at something my grandfather would have described as “just the ticket.” It’s the latest from Canada’s eminent and arguably most clear-sighted economist.
That would be Jim Stanford’s A Sequel We Don’t Want: What the 2026 Oil Price Shock Will Cost Canadians. His evidence-based argument reveals that it’s not just about the climate. Today’s affordability crisis is just the sequel to that of 2022. And needn’t be so.
Stanford displays not a smidgen of arrogance as he marshals his footnote-laden argument. Indeed, anyone who has seen him on TV panels or making an in-person speech knows that he has a modestly understated way about him, coupled with a low key, ironic sense of humour. (Full disclosure: I count Jim as a friend.) But what’s happening as fossil fuel behemoths make out like bandits seems to have clearly pissed him off.
“Maddening” isn’t a word you expect from a fellow using a rigorous, scholarly approach buttressed by unshakeable evidence. A financialized futures market — with much trading of paper contracts, not oil — has led to skyrocketing 2026 Canadian fuel prices. Don’t even try to connect the dots: There’s no connection whatsoever between Canadian pumps and the Trump/Netanyahu war in the Persian Gulf.
“Infuriating” also applies to the 2022 oil price shock, spurred in good measure by Putin’s war on Ukraine, a country with no petroleum reserves. Disruption of Russian petroleum exports wasn’t significant in global terms. Still, Canadian consumers paid a cumulative total $61 billion extra for gasoline, heating oil and fossil gas. Resulting interest rate spikes increased aggregate household interest costs by $65 billion over the three years from 2022 through 2024. On the other hand, Stanford explains, many European governments, faced with huge fossil gas price spikes and windfall fossil fuel profits took some control by imposing price caps and excess profits taxes on gas and power companies.
This interventionist approach might offer a lesson to Canadians. Unfortunately, it’s not gaining much traction here. Prime Minister Carney, the former investment banker and evangelist of free market fundamentalism, believes it’s better to let the market decide by continuing to subsidize fossil fuel interests while removing environmental protections. All the while making the laughable claim that paving the way for new mines (critical minerals, don’t you know?) somehow represents a “generational” change. Think again. This a country where mining has long dominated much of the hinterland. Sudbury. Trail. Timmins. Cape Breton. Val D’or. The list is long. See British Columbia. Lots of coal still buried in the Rockies.
Time for Unconventional Wisdom
There’s this prevailing notion that price hikes are natural, and the inevitable and irresistible result of the free play of market forces.
“This is a lie,” writes Stanford.
It’s rare for an economist to be so boldly clear while demolishing what another savvy Canadian economist and ironist famously called “conventional wisdom.” John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term to describe generally accepted economic ideas that are comfortable and predictable, and easy for people too accept. They’re soothing, fitting in smoothly with the status quo.
Stanford says it’s time to regroup. Why not, he argues, move fast, boldly subsidizing the transition to renewable, non-emitting energy? This would help fulfill, rather than abandon Canada’s climate commitments while simultaneously reducing energy costs. Support the adoption of electric vehicles. Bring in much stricter regulations promoting energy efficiency in all buildings, new and old. Encourage conversion of home heat from oil and fossil gas. Instead of subsidizing climate-killing schemes like Cenovus’s toxic tar sands, why not accelerate investments in renewable electricity generation? All of which would at the same time insulate while insulating us from the next oil price shock.
“Canadians should at least expect honesty regarding (the price shock’s) causes and consequences,” concludes Stanford. “Events in the Persian Gulf are dramatically affecting our economy because of a policy choice, not laws of economic nature…The only clear winner is the petroleum industry: its coming record profits, obtained partly at the expense of Canadians, will further exacerbate inequality and social tension.”
Jim Stanford’s writing can be found at the Centre for Future Work.
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Jamie Swift is the author of a dozen books, including, in 2004, Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire (with Keith Stewart). He is a member of Seniors for Climate Action Now! (SCAN!).