It’s been a brand-defining characteristic of the Liberal Party of Canada for more than a decade, a wedge issue successfully deployed against the Conservatives in four federal elections, and a useful tool to mobilize voters in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec specifically, but the Grits’ advantage on climate change is at risk of being squandered by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government...
A new study released Friday suggests that Canada is on track to miss its 2030 emissions target under the Paris Agreement -- and it won't even reach it by 2050, the year it was supposed to hit net-zero. The analysis, published by the Canadian Climate Institute, suggests recent climate policy rollbacks by the federal government have put Canada more than...
The impacts of climate change in Canada are now largely irreversible and average temperatures are expected to rise by at least 3.5 C by the end of the century, a new government report warns. The report, published Thursday, is the second released by Environment and Climate Change Canada examining changes to Canada's climate. It was authored by nearly two dozen...
Canadians will have to prepare for a future that's 5 C hotter, according to a new report summarizing the latest science on climate change. The second edition of Canada's Changing Climate Report, a synthesis of the science on the impact of a warming planet on Canadians, confirms with greater confidence that burning fossil fuels, or what the report calls "human...
Donald Trump’s trade war is accelerating Canada’s retreat from climate policy. When trade talks between Canada and the United States broke down on August 22 and Trump imposed tariffs of 50 per cent on almost $30 billion of Canadian goods, Canada had to respond. And it is responding. Prime Minister Mark Carney is standing up to Trump. I admire him...
The federal government is asking a Federal Court judge to toss out a lawsuit accusing Ottawa of having no intention of meeting its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target. In recent court filings, government lawyers argued the Federal Court doesn't have the power to order the government to take steps to meet its emissions targets. The government also argued it wasn't...
The federal government is asking a court to toss out a high-profile environmental lawsuit, arguing that it's not required to update Canada's climate plan to meet national emissions reduction targets. The government also says it's not the court's role to make or direct climate policy, and has filed a motion asking the court to strike the case before it goes...
The federal government is spending $34 million for 141 climate resilience projects across the country. Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin is in Halifax this morning to make the announcement. That city is receiving nearly $800,000 to install cooling measures in its parks to help residents stay cool in extreme heat.
Staff at the federal Fisheries Department are worried the United States government is about to adopt legislation jeopardizing the survival of the North Atlantic right whale, according to an internal government memo. The memo was sent to senior officials in the federal department in May and released to The Canadian Press through an access to information request. It discusses a...
A new online poll from the Angus Reid Institute suggests that one in six 2025 Liberal voters now say they would support the NDP. The pollster found that half of these voters cite climate change as the issue that concerns them most. Angus Reid reports that 21 per cent of respondents nationally say that climate change is a top concern...
Renewed concern about a changing climate is pushing environmental issues back onto Canadians' political radar and creating thorny challenges for Prime Minister Mark Carney and the governing Liberals. New data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds that, as wildfires burn across Canada, the U.S. and Europe, the proportion of Canadians choosing climate change as a top concern has risen...
The Carney government's financial support for the oil and gas industry amounts to breaking a federal commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, according to environmental advocates. They say the measures represent further federal backsliding on climate policy at a time when oil industry earnings are on the rise. After the Trudeau Liberals promised to phase out "inefficient" fossil fuel...
As we surveyed the sickly yellow sky in Toronto on Wednesday, coloured by out-of-control wildfires up north, we thought back to the burning season of last year. In August, 2025, wildfire did to the village of Kingston, N.L., what two centuries of wars, economic depression and storms could not: wiped much of it off the map. Facilitated by drought (itself...
As Prime Minister Mark Carney attempts to make Canada an energy superpower, he is conceding for the first time that the country’s greenhouse gas emissions will be “higher in the next few years” than projected under the previous government’s plan. The admission came in his second “Forward Guidance” video address to Canadians released on Tuesday. “In my judgement, that plan...
Activists want a new climate plan from the federal government. Speaking at Trinity College in Ireland last weekend, Mark Carney recalled that Edmund Burke, the influential 18th-century politician and philosopher (and an alumnus of Trinity), had once described society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.
‘I was becoming a tool to justify some of the things the government is doing, which I find to be unjustifiable,’ Canada’s former environment minister Steven Guilbeault says on leaving the Liberals — in an exclusive interview with The Narwhal
For a guy who spent much of his career talking and writing about climate policy, Mark Carney has been conspicuously quiet on the subject ever since becoming prime minister. Part of that, I’m sure, is a desire to avoid the mistakes made by the last guy who had his job. And part of it is an understandable need to prioritize...
The co-founder of Ottawa's independent net-zero advisory body says she has been "disappointed" by Prime Minister Mark Carney's commitment to climate action to date. Catherine Abreu was speaking at a parliamentary committee on the environment Tuesday, along with fellow co-founder Simon Donner. They both resigned from the federal government's net-zero advisory body in December after accusing the Carney government of...
Between May 28 and June 2, 2026, Abacus Data surveyed 1,910 Canadian adults to better understand attitudes towards climate change, federal government performance on the issue, and how Canadians believe climate action should fit alongside economic priorities.
A new analysis shows the Carney government's pipeline deal could lead Canada further from its climate targets, even with an agreement on carbon pricing. The independent Canadian Climate Institute modelled the impact of the new deal between Alberta and Ottawa on carbon pollution. Compared with the emissions trajectory before the deal was signed, the institute's analysis found Canada's emissions would...
The federal government is facing increased pressure to state whether it knows how some of its recent policy changes will affect Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin was peppered with questions on the issue at a parliamentary committee hearing on Thursday. Bloc Quebecois MP Patrick Bonin pressed Dabrusin on whether the government had modelling to show how it...
One word kept coming up this week, as Steven Guilbeault tendered his resignation from a government in which he no longer thought he could do his most important work. The word was “room.” As in: Is there still room on the Liberal benches for an ardent environmentalist? Can the party offer room for pipeline and resource proponents, alongside people animated...
As Guilbeault resigns, McKenna, Wilkinson and 'Katy Perry's boyfriend' in one room. It was the end of an era and the four politicians who were its chief architects gathered in one room in Ottawa. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau and his former climate change cabinet ministers — Catherine McKenna, Jonathan Wilkinson and Steven Guilbeault — on Wednesday were at the...
Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault was, for a time, the right man for the moment. That moment was 2019 and a few years that followed, before the worst polarizing effects and economic shockwaves of the COVID pandemic took hold and climate change still rates as a top political concern for Canadians. Guilbeault, a former Greenpeace activist turned Liberal politician, based much...
The co-chair of the Liberal climate caucus told the National Post that he “absolutely” supports Prime Minister Mark Carney’s approach to climate change policy. Éric St-Pierre has been conspicuously avoiding interviews about the caucus that he co-created to bring climate change issues back to the forefront of the government’s agenda ever since he gave an interview to Radio-Canada revealing the...
The federal Liberal climate caucus will meet Monday night, amid reporting several of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s MPs are concerned he’s backsliding on environmental commitments, sources tell CTV News. Sources also say Canadian Climate Institute president Rick Smith will attend the meeting to speak with MPs. The meeting comes amid reporting from Radio-Canada that more than a dozen MPs sent...
Letter was sent to PM prior to latest pipeline agreement with Alberta. Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault may be the most outspoken, but he's not the only member of his party unhappy with Prime Minister Mark Carney's environmental rollbacks. Carney signed a new agreement with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith last week that could see construction on an oil pipeline to the...
Former Liberal environment minister Stéphane Dion says Ottawa’s recent proposal to streamline major project reviews—which some environmentalists say could result in “the most consequential change to the fabric of Canadian environmental law in a generation”—is the latest in a trend of “backlash against climate policies.” “There is the sense that we went too far,” said Dion in an interview with...
Is Canada on track to meet its climate goals? The honest answer is “no,” and the really honest answer is that Canada’s climate goals will never be reached. They are folly and were designed by climate idealogues who had no concept of consequence, economic reality, or un...
The federal government's strategy to protect more than $100 billion worth of key infrastructure from the destructive impacts of climate change has significant gaps, with three key departments well behind where they need to be. That's the verdict of an audit by Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry V. DeMarco of the federal government's Greening Government Strategy. "As...
The economist John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Still, this is a hard piece for me to write. I devoted several years of my life to helping create the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance and its carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) project...
Earlier this month, the federal government quietly released its annual inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, now with data up to 2024. The news was not good. Carbon pollution reduction effectively stalled in 2024 (down a measly 0.3 per cent from the previous year and down only 10 per cent from 2005). Canada, simply put, is not on the trajectory...
PORTSMOUTH, Va. (AP) -- When President Donald Trump tried to cancel five massive offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast, it wasn't just environmentalists who cried foul. Nine Republicans in the U.S. House sent a letter to administration officials demanding an explanation.
Canada is at a crossroads. In the coming days and weeks, the federal government will decide whether the country compromises its climate commitments or embraces a more sustainable path towards a greener future.
An energy and climate policy-focused think tank is urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to deliver results on a slate of “critical” issues related to the federal government’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta, namely the industrial carbon pricing system. “This is the most important element of the (memorandum of understanding, or MOU),” wrote Chris Severson-Baker, the executive director of the Alberta-based...
Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday he's still committed to delivering incentives to help Canadians go green, something he promised during his bid for the Liberal leadership a year ago. Carney promised during the leadership campaign to re-fund the government's Greener Homes Grant program and to explore offering discounts to low- and medium-income homeowners who make energy-efficient retrofits.
After a few days of plaudits for sounding more mainstream, Poilievre reminds everyone he is a climate denier, and lacks an understanding of the global marketplace. The Trump administration has dented, but not ended, the drive towards emissions reduction. Capital investments in energy were expected to hit $3.3 trillion in 2025. Of every 3 dollars invested, 2 were going to...
