On the campaign trail, Freeland exploits Canada's two solitudes
Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland, candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, answers questions from journalists as she makes her way to a meeting of the Liberal caucus, in West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has weighed in on the future of carbon pricing if she becomes the next Liberal leader, but what she said raises more questions than answers.
In an interview with French-language TVA last week, Freeland said climate action is a major issue for her and she supports the cap and trade system Quebec has used since 2013. Unlike federal carbon pricing that puts a cost on each tonne of greenhouse gas pollution, Quebec’s cap and trade system allows companies to emit up to a certain amount before it must buy carbon credits. If a business stays under its threshold, it can sell its unused credits to others in the market, creating an economic incentive to slash emissions.
“Quebec has an excellent climate action plan: the carbon market,” she said, in French. Canadians don’t like the system in other provinces where consumers directly pay a carbon price, she said, adding she can’t repeatedly tell people their view is wrong. Climate action plans should not affect people directly, she said.
“Quebec shows us how effective it is,” she said. “Climate action is more popular in Quebec than in all the other provinces thanks to your system. We need that in the other provinces.”
Does that mean Freeland is proposing a national cap and trade system? Not so fast, her team says.
“I would see it more as Chrystia being ready to make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions, while not fighting Canadians on a policy they have been clear they do not support,” a spokesperson said, in response to clarification. “She will replace the consumer carbon price with a system that will work within our federation and will be developed collaboratively with provinces and territories.”
The spokesperson stopped responding to Canada’s National Observer when pressed for details.
Such is the nature of politics in Canada, said Charles-Édouard Têtu, a climate and energy policy analyst with Montreal-headquartered Équiterre.
Polling consistently shows Quebecers support climate action more than people in other provinces. The reason has less to do with any social or cultural differences that may exist between French and English Canada, Têtu said, and is more that Quebec is far enough removed from the oil and gas industry’s power that politicians don’t have to try to appease all regions of the country. Partly as a result, a much stronger consensus around the benefits of climate action has emerged. Plus, for Quebecers Hydro-Québec is a nationalist symbol and a major employer, and as an electricity superpower on the continent it strongly positions the province for the unfolding energy transition.
“Ms. Freeland is a good politician, and she knows that Quebecers want to feel special, they want to hear that they're not like the rest of Canada,” he said. “By saying what's going on in Quebec works, I think she knew exactly what she was doing.”
If Freeland wants to win this race she must be clear about what she wants, he said. “And as of right now, she's seen as someone who is tip-toeing on a delicate subject and that doesn't want to commit herself to ambitious climate action.”
As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, the federal Liberals lost control of the carbon pricing narrative after relentless attacks on it from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. His barbs were so successful that even in an affordability crisis, he was able to turn a majority of Canadians against a policy that puts more money into most peoples’ pockets than it takes.
Now, Liberal leadership contenders are floundering for ideas on what to replace the policy with, and “we have Freeland going back on what she did, and having two discourses in Quebec and in the rest of Canada,” Têtu said.
Both Freeland and Mark Carney, the former central banker now running for Liberal leader, have said they would ditch the consumer facing carbon price that helped to sink Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But neither have clearly said what they would replace it with.
Nonetheless, the climate wing of the Liberal Party have begun lining up behind Carney’s bid to take over the party.
Comments
This article is a bit premature on Carney. On January 31 he held his first press conference, choosing the Halifax harbour to do so. He described a carbon trading market where the biggest polluters will pay for climate remediation. He frequently reiterated that he will foster a system that will focus heavily on building out clean energy infrastructure. In fact, that is his most important campaign plank and has been central to all his talks for years. Look them up. He also reiterated that carbon in our exports will eventually be priced in places like the EU, putting the onus on the exporter to decarbonize. If the carbon market works out, the consumer dependency on fossil fuels will decrease without a direct price on carbon consumption because renewables will be funded with third party money.
Personally, I don't care if the rebates and grants for residential heat pumps and grid-based solar and wind farms come from private industry or public accounts (or a blend of the two), as long as they are exceedingly generous to make the full conversion to clean electricity affordable for all, including those of us who face associated costs for energy upgrades to older homes.
Carney frequently mentions that there is a huge critical mass of investment money now backing renewables internationally, and the sum now exceeds the investments in fossil fuels by orders of magnitude. Recent IEA data confirms this, but Carney is seeing even more investment money emerging. He is also deeply aware of the cost of climate change through his many discussions with international insurance industry big wigs.
He chose Jan 31 for the press conference because Trump's tariffs were to begin the next day. Carney, along with the majority of Canadian politcos of all stripes (with only one notable exception and one notable abstention from discussion of the issue so far) seem to have united behind a very strong in kind response and push back to the bully. Carney was as resolute as any of them and reiterated that Trump is temporary and it's important to have a plan beyobd Trump with outside options to further build allegiences with our non-US allies, but also to keep planning for the long term future using clean energy.
I am as cynical as anyone when it comes to politicians, having seen decades of often bitter disappointments. But Carney is a breath of fresh air.
Though he seems to focus on harnessing private capital to fight climate, leaving public money relatively alone, and the topic of public ownership of said infrastructure remains unaddressed, having big polluters pay for renewables is a great idea. They will have to address their own carbon footprint in doing so. Building renewable energy projects puts dumb ideas like CCS in their place. Investment money will focus on one over the other, and if government strongly prioritizes renewables, the choice is already made.
I am willing to give Carney a chance. No one else has such a detailed plan backed by long experience in the macro. No one else is discussing clean energy as extensively and exclusively while also discussing the importance of maintaining a strong social program network backed by a strong national economy, and having the mechanics of doing that down to an art.