One of many puzzles with regard to Canada’s international green man of mystery, Prime Minister Mark Carney, is where the climate fanatic who created the ill-fated GFANZ and wrote Value(s) has gotten to behind his characteristic screen of vapid rhetoric. Some on the left say he’s totally abandoned his climate beliefs and is a sinister sellout puppet of oil companies. And, as evidence, they can point to things like canceling the consumer carbon tax, suspending the EV mandate and signing friendly-sounding deals with Alberta over new pipelines. If only. A new bureaucratic entity with the Orwellian title “Business Future Pathways,” very much in the Carney rhetorical style and spawned by his Department of Finance, has just spawned a “draft ‘green taxonomy’ methodology” that, historian Tammy Nemeth warns, shows that Carney still believes his beliefs. It identifies “climate-aligned investment in Canadian projects, sectors, and economic activities” to “help drive investments that align with Canada’s clean growth and decarbonization priorities”. In other words it’s the ultimate naughty-and-nice list to determine who gets access to investment funds from here on. Anyone, including in the Canadian corporate sector, who thinks they can now relax and make money with that frivolous Justin Trudeau finally back on the celebrity circuit and a sober, PhD-in-economics central banker in charge, had better pay serious attention.
It is important to recall that ideas have consequences, both in terms of the actions they inspire and the other ideas that they lead one to adopt based on internal consistency. Thus Carney’s beliefs, if not radically altered in a lunge for power rather than merely cloaked in glass-bead-game verbiage, go far beyond a kind of naïve and standalone belief that humans are setting the sky on fire with plant food and must be stopped. It all connects in this Davoisian world of nudge theory, “induced demand” and other opaque ideas about how ordinary people are dolts who will ruin everything if left to their own devices.
The actual institutional framework is the kind of thing that Yes Minister would struggle to parody, like Carney’s Major Projects Office that hasn’t approved a single major project in nearly a year, or his sovereign wealth fund built on borrowed money:
“Business Future Pathways was created to develop a ‘made-in-Canada’ sustainable finance taxonomy in partnership with the Canadian Climate Institute. An appointment committee led by the former chair of the Trudeau-era ‘sustainable finance action council’ assembled the ‘taxonomy and transition planning council,’ a mix of institutional investors, regulators, bankers, academics and climate activists that oversees the project.”
And sometimes one hopes such ventures in keeping minutes while wasting hours will collapse of its own pompous weight, or float away from its own insubstantiality. Just because a report says “The taxonomy will be credible, usable, interoperable, dynamic, regionally specific, and prioritized” doesn’t mean it will be. Or that some of those words have real-world meanings. We particularly suspect “interoperable” and “prioritized”, classic bits of Carney-speak that could mean anything, nothing or both depending which way the wind is blowing but sure sound good.
It’s a classic visit to fantasyland in that Section 1.0 begins “As climate impacts intensify and the global energy transition continues, investors are proactively assessing their exposure to climate-related risks in their portfolios”. And it reeks of committee drafting, with language like:
“Taxonomies are science-based, and improve clarity and confidence across the market by creating standardized metrics and common language.”
Ooooh. Science-based. Experts say. You even get elbows up:
“The Canadian taxonomy will also bring a Canadian lens to economic activities covered in other taxonomies, taking into account how technical pathways for decarbonizing these activities could differ from other jurisdictions.”
This reference to “a Canadian lens” reminds us of the old journalistic jibe about national navel-gazing, “What’s the Canadian perspective on a mudslide?” Especially as there’s nothing specially red-and-white-maple-leaf about all this verbiage and related ideology. Indeed it’s very cookie-cutter, including having that “we’ll-all-get-rich” glossy take on the supposed green energy transition with no mention of how poorly it has worked in places that aren’t Canada as well as in ones that are:
“Developing a Canadian sustainable finance taxonomy comes at an important juncture, as climate transition risks accelerate and increasingly shape global capital allocation decisions and the fundamentals of economic competitiveness.”
Regrettably such processes and institutions do develop a kind of pseudo-dynamism in which the more harm they do the bigger and stronger they get. And Mark Carney and his associates are determined to force it on us no matter how poorly it works:
“Importantly, taxonomy guidance will be based on criteria aligned with science-based climate objectives – not economic projections, national priorities beyond climate, or short-term market cycles.”
Or how opaque it is until it’s too late.
As Nemeth warns:
“It’s initially for voluntary use, but what begins as voluntary rarely stays voluntary.”
One peculiarity, not of this particular document but of such exercises generally, is that at 67 pages the draft is too long to be read and understood, but far too short to be an actual set of rules. It is at once trite and incomprehensible, as for instance with:
“To enable strong uptake within capital markets, the criteria for climate-aligned investments will need to be usable for organizations of varying size and maturity within both the financial and real economy sectors. To achieve this, the criteria will be informed by feasible and cost-effective technology pathways… The taxonomy will be developed in phases.”
So it opens the door to bureaucratic discretion, improvisation in the face of unexpected results, and a downward spiral into an overregulated economy-crushing nightmare with a smiley face. The last things it offers are clarity and certainty.
As Nemeth writes:
“Climate mitigation is the focus of the taxonomy’s first phase but climate adaptation and resilience, biodiversity and other environmental and social objectives are expected to be layered on later. Once the framework is in place, expansion becomes the default path, turning a limited classification system into a tool for steering capital to businesses aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement and Canada’s “Net-zero by 2050” target.”
Yup. There it is again. Paris. We’ll always have Paris, at least in the minds and plans of climate activists. They may make noises about how this or that particular plan was unwise. But it’s always as a prelude to making a new and supposedly better one, never a recognition that the goals were impossible or the premises unsound.
Channeling Friedrich Hayek, Nemeth also provides this highly pertinent cautionary assessment that, again, is not just about this document but about the whole Davos project and mindset:
“What is presented as guidance is actually central planning of private capital under a climate label. Free markets allocate capital through prices, insurance, risk assessment and the decentralized decisions of millions of investors. A taxonomy replaces all that with committee judgments, embedding political priorities into the cost and availability of finance. But no committee possesses the knowledge to rank activities correctly across changing technologies and preferences. Committees’ criteria invariably lag innovation, embed political assumptions and attract special-interest capture. A green taxonomy is antithetical to a free-market system. Private capital does not exist to be conscripted into official pathways. Redirecting it by bureaucratic fiat substitutes political priorities for voluntary choice and undermines the principle that investment decisions properly belong to the owners of the capital.”
As you’d expect from Carney Mark I. As for Mark II, the one who claims to want to make Canada an energy superpower, she further warns that:
“A green taxonomy is antithetical to a free-market system. Private capital does not exist to be conscripted into official pathways. Redirecting it by bureaucratic fiat substitutes political priorities for voluntary choice and undermines the principle that investment decisions properly belong to the owners of the capital.”
It would be good for this country if those who run business enterprises were clearer on this kind of point, rhetorically and even conceptually. On which point we give Nemeth the final word:
“The sound response is, not to try to negotiate better criteria, but to completely reject the premise that private capital requires an official hierarchy to function. Free markets do not need activist criteria or scorecards; they need clear property rights, neutral rules and freedom for capital to respond to genuine market signals, not ‘guidance’ systems that expand technocratic control over private investment.”
P.S. Speaking of final words, if you wanted to weigh in on the draft, so sorry, too late. The “Consultation Period” was July 9 through August 13, 2026, with the latter being the “Deadline for submissions”.
