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TOP STORY
As a former Greenpeace activist who became the most visible defender of the federal carbon tax, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has long been the easy bogeyman for Albertans, Conservatives and the clear majority of voters who want carbon pricing reduced or abolished.
But Guilbeault’s three-year tenure also saw him rack up any number of opponents in other spheres.
The people of Jasper, Alta. accused his office of ignoring the measures that might have saved their town from fiery devastation — and then similarly ignoring their pleas for rebuilding assistance. He alienated Canadian plastic-makers by declaring their product as “toxic” before having the order slapped down by the Federal Court as “unreasonable and unconstitutional.”
When Guilbeault said last year that his government was going to stop building roads, rural MPs accused him of abandoning First Nations to an eternity of mud roads and isolation.
Conservationists are blaming him for failing to protect B.C.’s southern mountain caribou, while different conservationists are suing him for failing to protect orcas.
All of which is to say, as new Liberal Leader Mark Carney apparently moves to shuffle Guilbeault away from the environment file, he’s distancing himself from one of the more ignominious characters of Justin Trudeau’s government.
As of press time, it’s unclear whether Guilbeault will retain an affiliated file or stay in cabinet. This is in contrast to several other ministers, including Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Public Safety Minister David McGuinty are expected to keep their portfolios. While Anita Anand, the transport minister, is expected to change portfolios but remain in cabinet.
One of the facts about Guilbeault most frequently mentioned by his critics is his repeated arrests as a Greenpeace activist in the early 2000s. The Conservative party seems to be citing this period when they refer to Guilbeault in party literature as Trudeau’s “wacko Environment Minister.”
In 2001, he was arrested for scaling the CN Tower and unveiling a banner reading “Canada and Bush Climate Killers.”
The next year, he was arrested again for climbing onto the Calgary home of then Alberta Premier Ralph Klein. Although it was a stunt to pretend to install solar panels on the home, Klein’s wife Colleen saw only a nondescript van pull up and discharge men in orange jumpsuits who proceeded to climb onto the roof. “I was terrified,” she would say later.
When Guilbeault took the helm of Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2021, the Liberal carbon-pricing framework was already well-entrenched. The terms of the carbon tax had been passed into law in 2018, when Guilbeault was still just a backbencher for the Montreal-area riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie.
Nevertheless, Guilbeault became the face of the tax as it rapidly transformed into the single most unpopular policy of the Trudeau government.
This was most dramatically illustrated in 2023, when Atlantic Canada became the last region of the country subjected to a carbon levy. Overnight, Liberal polls numbers dropped off a cliff, and the region’s four premiers banded together in a campaign to “Fight the Federal Gas Hike.”
Throughout all of this, it was Guilbeault’s job to repeatedly slap down requests for succour, and to insist that regular hikes to the tax move forward.
This happened as recently as November. With the looming threat of a trade war with the United States, Guilbeault announced that the carbon price would undergo its scheduled April 1 increase as planned. “Of course, we’re going to continue with the carbon tax because it creates jobs,” he told a House of Commons committee last November.
(Only Carney’s promise to end the carbon tax has forced Guilbeault to change his tune a bit; he’s now musing about how Canada could even scrap the carbon tax before the April 1 deadline.)
One of the initial selling points of the carbon tax was that most of its revenue was returned to Canadians in the form of rebates, and that it was a market-based approach to curbing emissions that avoided the need for blunter forms of government intervention.
“Pricing carbon is widely recognized as an efficient way to reduce emissions at lowest cost to business and consumers and support innovation and clean growth,” was how then environment minister Catherine McKenna pitched the policy to the House of Commons back in 2018.
But Guilbeault’s record as environment minister has been marked by a crush of quotas, caps and mandates that the carbon tax was ostensibly meant to replace.
In 2023, his ministry pushed through a ban on gas-powered car sales by 2035. At the time, electric vehicles represented just 10 per cent of auto sales, meaning that consumers would be forced to make up the additional 90 per cent in just 12 years.
That same year, Guilbeault signed Canada up for a plan to be “net-zero” in emissions by 2050. Although Guilbeault’s office never calculated the cost of the endeavour, RBC estimated it to be about $2 trillion, with the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum also tacking on an additional $100 billion in foregone earnings.
In 2024, Guilbeault rolled out an emissions cap on the Canadian oil and gas sector. Although Guilbeault claimed the policy wouldn’t have any effect on production, a Deloitte analysis determined it would eventually kneecap Alberta oil output by as much as 620,000 barrels per day.
And in boosting the cap, Guilbeault would unwittingly provide a sound bite that has been repeated endlessly by his most committed critics (the group Canada Action has even put it on billboards): “Look around the world. No other major oil and gas producer is doing what we’re doing — the United States, Norway, Gulf states. We are the only major oil and gas producers in the world to do this,” he told reporters in November.
Despite Carney’s apparent willingness to sideline Guilbeault, the Montreal MP was actually one of the earliest supporters of the former central banker.
“I know he’s the right person to help bring us into the next phase of our work to support Canadians to build a strong economy and to fight climate change,” Guilbeault said in a Jan. 23 endorsement.
Despite a recent exodus of Trudeau cabinet ministers announcing their intention not to run for re-election, Guilbeault has stayed the course.
Given the dynamics of his riding, however, this puts Guilbeault in the front lines of Liberals not likely to see the next Parliament. Laurier—Sainte-Marie is traditionally held by either the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, and Guilbeault won it with a margin of just 37 per cent in 2021.
IN OTHER NEWS
Speaking of ill-conceived environmental policy, the Swedish battery maker Northvolt just filed for bankruptcy. Only a couple years ago, this would been an immaterial piece of financial news to most Canadians. But Northvolt happens to be the company to which the Trudeau government pledged billions of dollars in subsidies in 2023 in order to convince them to build a battery factory in Quebec. At almost the precise moment that deal was being signed, Northvolt was beginning to rack up the first major losses in what would turn out to be an irreversible bankruptcy spiral.
Each passing day seems to yield less and less evidence that there is any deeper motive to U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Canada, and that he just seems to like tariffs. In recent comments in the Oval Office, Trump said Americans must tolerate the “disruptions” of the trade war until Canada is annexed. “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S. just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago. And it makes no sense,” he said. The U.S. economy also seems to be coming to the conclusion that Trump simply likes tariffs, which is why the stock market continues to plunge and the U.S. dollar is hemorrhaging value. The good news for Canada is that even Trump voters aren’t tremendously happy with all this.
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