With Canada’s election over and the restrictions on free speech on policy issues during an election lifted, we can observe that the new federal administration of Mark Carney is at once committed to Net Zero and obliged to revive the economy after a lost decade of sluggish productivity, weak investment and minimal real wage growth. It will be an interesting demonstration project to see how they try to do it, and what results. Especially as part of the Canadian national reaction to Donald Trump’s annexation-and-tariff lack-of-charm offensive was supposedly to realize we’d been fools to neglect our economy so blithely, thus rendering ourselves vulnerable, and we must and would do better. Allegedly this realization had taken hold from coast to coast and from bottom to top. But did Carney and his Liberal associates really take it to heart? And even if they did, did they also take it to brain? We’re about to find out, and it may not be pretty.

Canadian commentator Matthew Lau drew a bleak picture in National Review:

“While he successfully hid his climate radicalism during the campaign, Carney has been a prime mover behind efforts to decarbonize the world’s economies through pressure on the financial sector – rather than through the usual democratic process – essentially by persuading financial institutions to reduce their financing to CO2-intensive industries, something that would have a major impact on critical sectors of the Canadian economy. ‘Carney is a climate zealot,’ as economist Ross McKitrick describes, who ‘lobbied to defund and drive out of existence Canada’s oil and gas companies, steel companies, car companies and any other sector dependent on fossil fuels. He’s done this through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which he founded in 2021.”

The day of the election Heatmap emailed that ‘Canada’s election, light on climate, culminates today’. Which may have helped Carney win since his beliefs on the topic, if scary, were not prominent. But by the same token they may make it harder for him to govern, if he is about to surprise the public with a radical agenda he conveniently failed to mention during the campaign.

The Canadian Climate Institute seems to think so. They put out a press release “Canadian Climate Institute congratulates Prime Minister Mark Carney and his newly elected government” in which their president said:

“The Institute looks forward to working with the Carney government on policy solutions that will enhance Canada’s sovereignty and energy security, while also reducing emissions, enabling low-carbon economic growth, and building more resilient homes and infrastructure.”

And after lunch, world peace. And the Institute is a completely impartial, independent, evidence-based outfit funded by… uh… “Environment and Climate Change Canada and a growing list of philanthropic funders.”

The Canadian energy executives leaders who wrote a half-hearted appeal to all major political leaders to drop the Net Zero nonsense also seem to think the wind turbine is blowing in a green energy transition direction with renewed force. They have revised their letter to make it more obsequious to the Prime Minister. But they still want him to revive the sector, especially oil and gas, and it’s just really hard to do so while eliminating carbon emissions. As Alex Epstein put it, not mincing words:

“Canada is squandering the greatest oil opportunity on Earth/ Canada has 3X US oil reserves but less than 40% the production. Why? Anti-oil politicians like Mark Carney who say they’re protecting Earth’s coldest country from global warming.”

Well, is it? And are such politicians the problem? Is Carney, indeed, “anti-oil”? These are fair questions, especially given Carney’s very typical Liberal campaign of high-minded gutter attacks, hopeful fearmongering, and incompatible pledges including taking an “elbows-up” approach to Donald Trump before going to the Oval Office to flatter him egregiously bath on live television.

In an even more pointed piece in The Hub, Derrick Hunter wrote:

“For those of us living in reality, the discussion of energy policy in this election is discouraging. Even after Trump’s tariff threats demonstrated that Canada’s energy industry is a uniquely vital strategic asset, we continue to inevitably observe gnashing of teeth over the perceived conflict between increasing oil and gas production and Canada’s “net-zero” ambitions. Even The Hub identified it as one of the three key challenges for the next prime minister. Let’s be honest with ourselves; Canada’s economy will never be net-zero. It is a fantasy developed and promoted by progressives and globalists (but I repeat myself) that will not happen because it defies the laws of physics and the realities of economics and human behaviour. Don’t take my word for it; this is a conclusion reached by energy luminaries including Daniel Yergin and Vaclav Smil.”

In one possible scenario, Mark Carney knows it’s not possible and will quietly abandon it. In another he knows but will go all-out for it anyway. But in another he doesn’t know it’s impossible and will go all-out for it creating a disaster he can’t begin to comprehend as it unfolds. And the last is the most dangerous and, alas, also the most probable.

He has, after all, spent 20 years doing well by doing good as a green zealot. And without denying politicians’ capacity for disingenuousness, we suspect it’s because he was and is a true believer. As Jordan Peterson commented to podcaster Joe Rogan during the election, noted by Tristin Hopper in the National Post:

“‘All you have to do is read his book, but people don’t, of course, because it’s a book,’ said Peterson. ‘Either he’s decided that every single thing he’s ever believed was wrong right to the core,’ said Peterson, or he’s a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’”

And we think he has remarkably big ears, tail and teeth.

Among other things, while cynically reducing the consumer carbon tax to zero during the election, Carney promised to defend the industrial one and to impose a “carbon border adjustment mechanism”, aka a carbon tariff. And presumably because he thinks they’re good policy. Which, Meghan Potkins in a Financial Post piece noted, has Canadian industry worried. It’s not a dilemma you can solve by pretending it’s not there. Like the impact of the oil and gas emissions cap. You either enforce it or you don’t, and if you do, it has a major negative economic impact, as Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer pointed out and then, in an unusual step, reiterated when the usual political suspects rubbished his analysis.

It’s worth noting here that another major issue, not addressed during the 2025 Canadian federal election even by the admittedly feeble standards of contemporary political discourse, is the breakdown of functioning throughout the government on files from the mundane to the speculative. In the Financial Post a Chris Varcoe column was headlined:

“Actions not words – Canada’s next PM needs to get major energy projects built, not just debated”.

But it is far from clear that he could even if he wanted to. It has never been the case, going back to the Pharaohs and beyond, that a politician only had to tell a bureaucrat “Do this” and it would be done or at least attempted. But in Canada, where the government can’t even pay its employees with its once-new Phoenix pay system that keeps not rising from its own ashes, a sincere and determined effort to streamline project approval might go totally wrong or just nowhere.