“Net-Zero Tyranny”

When Mark Carney arrived on the Canadian political stage, Richard Brooks’s colleagues sought out his professional opinion.

Would they be dealing in the Liberal prime minister with a friend of the environment or a foe?

Brooks, the head of climate finance with Canadian advocacy group Stand.Earth, has followed Carney’s meteoric rise over the last decade from staid central bank governor to global climate guru to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Watch what he does not what he says. He left plenty of ways to block his “pipeline”.

OTTAWA — Most Canadians think it’s nothing but hot air.

That’s what the results of a recent Leger poll on the industrial carbon tax reveal, suggesting most Canadians believe the costs of the levy aren’t absorbed by emitters but instead passed onto them.

Ten years ago, then-governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney gave a speech at Lloyd’s of London titled “Breaking the tragedy of the horizon.” It outlined his plan for the global financial system to internalize the “catastrophic impacts of climate change.” It was the first time Carney had publicly identified climate change as a threat to the stability of global financial markets — one that governments and regulators had to combat. Carney called on banks, insurance companies, public pension plans and other institutional investors to align their financing with their climate commitments by restricting oil and gas companies’ access to capital and investing instead in companies that would help the transition to the “net-zero world of the future.”

Ten months before he resigned from Mark Carney’s cabinet, Steven Guilbeault vouched for the then Liberal leadership contender.

“I’ve known Mark for many years. We’ve worked together on issues of green energy, transition, fighting climate change and the role of the financial sector in fighting climate change,” Guilbeault told reporters when he endorsed Carney’s candidacy to lead the party in January.

So long as he and Brookfield can profit.

Whether he intended to or not, Prime Minister Mark Carney cast aside a tenet of the Liberals’ brand last Thursday when he signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta that jeopardizes the Grits’ work addressing climate change.

For more than two decades, the Liberal Party of Canada told voters that it was the party that not only cared about climate change but was best able to address it. Election after election, from Jean Chrétien’s climate pivot in 2002 with the ratifying of the Kyoto accord, to Stéphane Dion’s “Green Shift,” to Justin Trudeau’s pan-Canadian framework on “Clean Growth and Climate Change,” to Carney’s platform, which mentioned the threat of climate change 27 times, the Liberal party told Canadians that the future of the planet depended on strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it pledged to do that while strengthening the economy through clean energy investments.