We’ve been keeping an eye on the Carney administration’s efforts to go sane on climate policy, somehow squaring their carbon obsession with a desire not to wreck the economy too quickly and drastically. And as we predicted, it’s not going well. The Fraser Institute’s Kenneth Green in the Calgary Sun notes that the first, and second, tranches of projects anointed by the Prime Minister to be reanointed by the Major Projects Office does not include any oil pipelines. As Green added tartly, “The absence of proposed oil pipelines was not surprising, as Ottawa’s regulatory barricade on oil production means no sane private company would propose such a project.” And even if they wanted to, it’s bizarrely hard to see how. Instead of sweeping away regulations, simplifying the process, and dropping the woke warming zealotry, they’ve found a way to make it even worse. As we feared.

Non-Canadians, and indeed many Canadians, may not have realized yet just how weird our policy-making process has become. As one of us observed in a column in the Epoch Times:

“Given its name, the naive might assume [the Major Projects Office] receives applications for major projects from interested entrepreneurs, processes them quickly, approves those not anti-social, and then slides them through the said impenetrable tangle of legal, regulatory, and political barriers that paralyze major investment projects here, especially in our vital natural resources sector. Or, better yet, reduce those barriers themselves, not just boost favoured applicants over them. But this is Canada.”

So instead the Prime Minister, through some process unknown to mere peasants, determines in advance that a major project shall be deemed worthy, and the PMO sends it to the MPO which does… what? Nobody seems to know, since it doesn’t have the capacity to push things through and it certainly seems unlikely to reject any King Carney has blessed, or push any he has not. And as Green rightly says:

“To have a chance to survive Canada’s otherwise oppressive regulatory gauntlet, projects must get on this Caesar-like-thumbs-up-thumbs-down list.”

But who in their right mind would even try to push a major project when the approval process works in this Caesarian manner? Only the fly-by-nighter and the connected shmoozer.

Even they might regret it. No sooner had King Carney decreed the worth of two natural-gas-related projects than an aboriginal outfit, specifically UBCIC (which is the “Union of BC Indian Chiefs” and boasts of being “an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations”) hollered that it violated their “inherent title” to Canada instead of the Canadian government, exactly the sort of thing that paralyzes resource investments, not least because Canadian governments seem to agree. Meanwhile the Green Party shrilled that “the decision hands an enormous political and financial power to Donald Trump’s billionaire backers, at the direct expense of Canadians.” So evidently we’re not all in it together. Boo Trump! Boo rich people!

As retired actual entrepreneur Gwyn Morgan complained in C2C Journal, after a decade of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate-inspired “staggering list of nation-impoverishing subsidies, taxes and restrictions”, we’d gotten nowhere on the ostensible purpose:

“As internationally respected environmental statistician and author Bjorn Lomborg has reported, between Trudeau’s election and 2023, fossil fuels’ share of Canada’s energy supply actually increased from 75 to 77 percent. But that wasn’t due to any sort of economic boom; energy consumption rose entirely due to Canada’s immigration-fuelled population boom.”

Morgan then noted the apparent turn in the direction of sanity from both Ted Nordhaus and Bill Gates, as we ourselves have done, adding:

“Gates’s and Nordhaus’s changes in tune are late-in-the-day conversions, to be sure; the enormous economic damage wrought by three decades of doom-mongering won’t be undone overnight. Still, better late than never.”

But this is Canada. And so:

“Prime Minister Mark Carney’s just-released budget saddles our already-struggling industries with carbon tax increases of $80-$170/tonne of CO2-equivalent emissions by 2030. Doing so increases Canadian businesses’ competitive disadvantage against our most important trading partner and does nothing to help the environment. It only puts Canada further offside global energy policy trends – and extends our country’s sad decline.”

As for that current Prime Minister, there’s been no change of heart, not from his silly predecessor and not from his own lucrative decades-long career as an international man of green finance. His ministry is still committed to Trudeau’s greenhouse-gas targets, and has no more idea how to get there than Trudeau did. And in announcing the second tranche of projects approved for approval, his press release gassed that:

“In September, Canada’s new government announced the first tranche of major projects – representing $60 billion in investments in nuclear power, LNG, critical minerals, and new trade corridors. We also outlined strategies – from Atlantic energy connecting wind and new transmission to carbon capture, high-speed rail, and a sovereign cloud – to drive tens of billions in further investments, while creating the conditions for a better-connected, more productive, and ambitious country. Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the second tranche of projects to build our economy. On their own, any one of these projects is transformational.”

He’s big on leveraging catalyzing transformations, catalyzing transformative leverage and transforming catalytic leverage. (As in “At this year’s G7 Summit in Kananaskis, the government launched the Critical Minerals Production Alliance and Critical Minerals Action Plan – a Canadian-led initiative to coordinate production and catalyse global investment.”)

They also like to “supercharge” things. Creating wealth? Not so much. Instead, here’s his Health Minister, no less (and we defy anyone to name them without checking):

“Climate action is not only a moral responsibility – it’s an economic necessity. The global shift to a low-carbon economy is accelerating, changing how growth happens and where capital flows. To stay competitive, Canada must catalyse investment across clean and conventional sectors so our industries can meet the world’s rising demand for low-carbon products and energy.”

Gotta catalyse those catalytics. So a press release from Natural Resources Canada “Canada advances energy innovation with major investments in carbon technologies and AI solutions” boilerplated that:

“the Minister announced the launch of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Canadian Energy Innovation Call for Proposals, which will fund high-impact RD&D projects that catalyze national expertise in Canadian-made AI solutions that accelerate the pace of domestic energy innovation and lower the associated costs…. The federal government is focused on getting projects built, supporting our industries and catalyzing a new era of economic growth.”

All catalyse all the time. (And yes, Carney insists on the British spelling so all his strong-minded, independent acolytes suddenly use it too.)

Meanwhile the usual suspects greeted Carney’s project list with calls for higher carbon taxes, more rules and regulations and gosh aw shucks folks way more money for us and our friends. And the subsidized legacy media peddle his vacuous line in prose that increasingly resembles his:

“Ottawa is preparing to lay out a new climate-change vision that will deprioritize Canada’s commitments to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions, in favour of focusing on ways to reap economic advantage from the global transition toward low-carbon energy. It’s to be presented in the new ‘climate competitiveness strategy’ that the government is aiming to release before the end of this month – a subject of speculation since Prime Minister Mark Carney first promised it in early September, with little explanation.”

Meet the new climate competitiveness strategy. Same as the old climate competitiveness strategy.

As Green’s piece concluded, so do we: “This policy fixation will come at a significant cost to future generations of Canadians.”