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Economy

Ruthless, reckless, damaging: the Hon. Steven Guilbeault is MLI’s Policy-maker of the year

Published

2 years ago

16 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Heather Exner-Pirot

Guilbeault has treated the fact that Canada is a democracy, a market economy, and a federation as inconveniences to be overcome.

The Liberals have been chided for focusing on communications over substance, for announcing policies rather than implementing them. But there is an exception to this rule: the ruthlessly efficient Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault. No one else in Canada has been as influential, and, in my view, no one else has done so much damage.

From an emissions cap to toxic plastic straws, and from Clean Electricity Regulations to the Clean Fuel Standard, Guilbeault has been advancing economy-killing and constitution-defying laws at a frenzied pace.

He was appointed Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada in October 2021. At the time of his appointment, Guilbeault appeared as the perfect villain: a caricature of the West-hating, anti-oil Liberal that has confounded the aspirations of Canadians west of the Laurentian corridor for decades. In the last two years he has disappointed few of his supporters and assuaged none of his critics’ fears.

Dubbed the “Green Jesus of Montreal” by La Presse, the 2001 image of Guilbeault being walked off in handcuffs in his faux orange prison jumpsuit emblazoned with the Greenpeace logo, following a CN Tower-scaling stunt to bring attention to climate change, features frequently in the social media accounts of his more outspoken critics.

The Canadian oil and gas sector has had a rough decade – from the shale revolution that flooded North America with cheap oil, to the COVID-19 pandemic – but it persisted. The sector achieved record breaking production, and royalties for governments, last year. The coming-into-service of TMX and CGL pipelines promises to grant additional export capacity for Canadian hydrocarbons.

But, like the final boss of a video game, Guilbeault is proving to be a formidable challenger to the country’s most important economic sector, even as the country struggles under declining productivity, persistent inflation and an affordability crisis. What Texas, Putin and OPEC could not undermine, Guilbeault is poised to do. This is intended as criticism but I expect Guilbeault would be pleased with the acknowledgment.

In this year alone he has advanced four sector-destroying policies, as part of the federal government’s much derided “pancake” approach to climate policy: stacking increasingly suffocating and incompatible regulations on Canadian industry to meet our Paris Accord commitments.

Carbon pricing schemes have broadly been accepted within heavy industry across Canada, if grudgingly. But with voters unwilling to accept a price per tonne of GHGs high enough to meaningfully address emissions, the Government has had to resort to additional, bespoke, mechanisms.

The Clean Fuel Regulations (CFR) came into effect on July 1, mandating reductions in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels through various methods, such as blending in biofuels. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found that the CFR are broadly regressive, impacting poorer households the most. The four Atlantic Premiers in particular contested the CFR on the grounds they would disproportionately hurt their residents, calling them “unfair and offensive to Atlantic Canadians” and demanding they be delayed. But Guilbeault blamed any price increase on refiners rather than his regulations, saying “there is simply no reason that they need to push costs onto consumers.”

While imploring refiners to decarbonize their product at a loss, Guilbeault also tacked on a ZEV (zero emissions vehicle) mandate to ensure any investments made in clean fuels today would have an ever-shrinking market and timeline to recoup costs. In other words, Guilbeault is asking refiners to invest in cleaner fuels while promising to ban their products before they could make back their money. The final regulations, mandating a 100 percent zero-emission vehicles sales target by 2035, were announced on December 19.

Such a move requires dramatically more capacity in the country’s electricity grid, up to 25% by some estimates. But, unbothered by the laws of physics, Guilbeault went ahead and introduced draft Clean Electricity Regulations (CER) in August. The CER will impose obligations on electricity generation to achieve net zero emissions in the grid by 2035 and will necessarily take large swathes of Canada’s existing generation capacity offline. In practice this means a phase out of coal, which is happening; and natural gas, which cannot realistically happen – particularly in the cold Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan where hydroelectric generating capacity is limited, nuclear is years away, and intermittent wind and solar are unsuitable. The CER prompted Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to launch a national ad campaign protesting that “No one wants to freeze in the dark”.

More sober western voices have also warned against the CER. The CEO of SaskPower sent a letter  arguing that while the utility was “on track to meet our commitment to reduce GHG emissions by 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030”,  the CER are “not possible from technological, financial and logistical perspectives.” But Guilbeault has remained adamant that there will be no special carve outs for any province.

The crowning achievement of Guilbeault’s economy-destroying climate policies was announced on December 7: an emissions cap, and cut, on one sector only, Canadian oil and gas. The announcement was not made in downtown Calgary, amongst those most affected, but in Dubai at COP28. Such a cap is counterproductive, expensive, and both economically and politically self-sabotaging. There is no limit to the punishment Guilbeault is willing to impose on the energy sector, regardless of the collateral damage to the rest of the Canadian economy.

Guilbeault’s accomplishments do not end at stymying Canada’s upstream and downstream oil and gas sector. It’s been a fractious time for federal-provincial relations, and a challenging one for the Canadian Constitution. On a list that included Danielle’s Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Act and Scot Moe’s Saskatchewan First Act; and invocations by Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan of the notwithstanding clause; it was not one, but two of Minister Guilbeault’s laws that were declared unconstitutional by Canadian courts this year.

In the first instance, the Supreme Court of Canada determined the Impact Assessment Act – previously known as Bill C-69, or the No More Pipelines Act – to reach far beyond federal jurisdiction, granting Parliament “a practically untrammeled power to regulate projects qua projects, regardless of whether Parliament has jurisdiction to regulate a given physical activity in its entirety.” The vast majority of sections within the IAA were deemed unconstitutional.

Guilbeault doubled down, saying that the federal government would “course correct”, but that it would be unlikely to change the outcome of the IAA process for projects.

Just one month later, the Federal Court of Canada held that the federal government’s labelling of all Plastic Manufactured Items (PMI) as toxic was both unreasonable and unconstitutional. Again, Guilbeault was undeterred, and announced on December 8 that the federal government would appeal it.

It appears that, in Guilbeault’s view, federalism is an inconvenient and unacceptable barrier to accomplishing meaningful progress on climate change. For an ideologue like Guilbeault, the Constitution was not designed for, and is not up to the task of, addressing the existential threat posed by fossil fuels. But that is no reason not to try. He will continue to seek new avenues to restrain industry and the provinces; he will just have to tighten up the language.

No amount of tweaking will prevent the Clean Electricity Regulations and oil & gas emissions cap from facing challenges from Alberta and Saskatchewan. The federal government will rely on its criminal law power to see them through. He has suggested that violating the Clean Electricity Regulations, for example running coal fired plants beyond 2030, would be an offense under the Criminal Code. The joke in the Prairies is that he wants his western counterparts to have orange jumpsuits that match his own.

Guilbeault is seen as a true believer. His mission is to save the planet from climate change, and to save oil and gas producing apostates from themselves. Nothing will persuade him he should moderate his efforts. But I would be remiss not to point out that Guilbeault has shown the ability to tolerate pragmatism in his own Cabinet.

The first instance was with nuclear energy. Long a lightning rod for 20th century environmentalists, Guilbeault has historically been opposed to nuclear. In the Liberals’ Green Bond Framework, released in March 2022, nuclear energy was excluded alongside sin industries like tobacco & alcohol sales, arms manufacturing, gambling, and fossil fuels. After public opinion evolved, and in the face of successful nuclear refurbishments and new reactor developments in the GTA, the Liberal government reversed its decision. Guilbeault duly ate his humble pie, saying in April 2023 that:

“In the past I haven’t been the person who supported the most the development of nuclear energy. But when you look at what international experts like the International Energy Agency or the IPCC is saying, they’re saying, to prevent global temperatures from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius, to achieve our carbon neutrality targets, we need this technology.”

This could not have been easy, and I applaud him for evolving his views in line with the evidence.

But he was not convinced enough to directly advocate for nuclear technology at COP28. On December 2, 2023 in Dubai, 22 states including Canada signed a landmark declaration committing to triple nuclear energy by 2050. Minister Guilbeault seemed to be everywhere at COP28; but he was not there for that announcement, missing the traditional ‘family photo’ of world leaders signing the nuclear declaration.

Likewise, Guilbeault had to accept with great reluctance the Liberals’ political gambit of exempting heating oil from carbon pricing. Their coalition must combine urban environmentalists and Atlantic Canadian townsfolk to win the next election. In the case of heating oil, the Atlantic caucus carried the day. But Guilbeault made clear it was a ploy not to be repeated, telling the Canadian Press in an interview on November 6th that he would not stand for any further concessions:

“As long as I’m the environment minister, there will be no more exemptions to carbon pricing…It’s certainly not ideal that we did it and in a perfect world we would not have to do that, but unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world.”

Guilbeault is a threat to Canada’s prosperity, and to our allies’ too. Germany, Japan, Korea and others have come asking for more energy exports, only to be told there was no business case. The federal government’s own policies are making it so.

But more to the point his climate policies, committed though they may be, are destined to fail.

It is often said that if you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.

Guilbeault is very far ahead from industry, the provinces, Canadians, and increasingly his own caucus. He is alienating voters who are concerned more about affordability and housing. There will likely be a backlash. As far as Guilbeault has swung the pendulum to the left, it will come swinging back at him and the Liberals the other way. The energy transition is a marathon, and Guilbeault is a sprinter.

One could almost admire Guilbeault’s unwavering commitment to his principles – his willingness to advance his goals in the face of criticism, resistance and alarm. But through his actions, Guilbeault has treated the fact that Canada is a democracy, a market economy, and a federation as inconveniences to be overcome.

Canadians that care about these things will find many reasons to be concerned with Guilbeault’s efforts this year. His impact on the nation’s politics and economy will be felt long after his policies have been overturned.

Heather Exner-Pirot is the director of energy, natural resources, and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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Business

Canada has an energy edge, why won’t Ottawa use it?

Published on October 17, 2025

By

Energy abundance, properly managed, isn’t just Canada’s strategic edge—it’s our ace in the hole while allies scramble to rearm their energy systems and competitors sprint ahead. We can keep sleepwalking through the annual ritual of self-imposed shackles, watching golden opportunities slip through our fingers, or we can finally show up as a serious player in the energy security game we’re already knee-deep in.

What the public doesn’t see behind all the climate summit fanfare is a carefully choreographed performance where capitals everywhere scramble to perfect their lines for the UN’s annual pageant. COP30 descends on Brazil in mid-November, and once again Ottawa looks primed to arrive clutching a stack of promises, desperately hoping that thunderous applause will somehow count as tangible progress in the real world.

Thanks to years of bureaucratic capture, our government keeps churning out the measures most fervently demanded by the climate lobby, and this ritual proceeds as if “net zero” were still a credible roadmap rather than a marketing slogan stretched so transparently thin it’s practically see-through. But out in the real world—away from the theatrical staging—the energy system keeps issuing updates of its own that no amount of wishful thinking can erase. The question this year cannot be what flashy new prohibition Ottawa can unveil on cue: are our leaders finally prepared to read the room? Away from the virtue-signalling theatre, countries are quietly adjusting to immovable realities: demand keeps climbing, reliability actually matters, and security trumps sermonizing—and we should be looking south to see what’s really working.

From 2005 to 2023, U.S. per-capita CO₂ emissions from energy plummeted by nearly a third. Not because of performative pledges or green grandstanding, but because coal quietly gave way to natural gas, with renewables filling in around the edges where they actually made sense. Pick almost any grid that made this pragmatic switch, and you’ll discover the same inconvenient pattern that climate absolutists prefer to ignore: fewer emissions and electricity you can actually count on when you flip the switch. Maryland serves as a clean example, where coal shrank from the backbone to a footnote as gas surged, helping keep the lights blazing when people needed them most.

Canada should pay very close attention to these uncomfortable truths. We benefit from hydro and nuclear in some regions, but what the green lobby doesn’t want to acknowledge is that our electricity demand is climbing relentlessly. Population growth alone would guarantee that outcome. Add the explosion in AI technology and it becomes utterly unavoidable, despite the silence from environmental groups. Even the cheerleaders of the new digital economy are brutally honest about this reality when pressed. The head of the world’s biggest AI chipmaker isn’t jesting when he bluntly tells the U.K. it will need gas turbines alongside nuclear and renewables to power its tech ambitions—inconvenient facts that shatter green fairy tales.

Another stubborn reality that doesn’t make it into climate summit speeches is that the International Energy Agency estimates oil and gas companies spend roughly half a trillion dollars every year just to keep output flat—a financial reality that exposes the “stranded assets” narrative as wishful thinking. Without this continual reinvestment, U.S. shale would crater within a single year. It’s rather difficult to describe that as a system drifting quietly into retirement, rather than an industrial backbone that still carries most of the load while activists pretend otherwise. If you’re Canada, that looks less like a looming problem than a golden opening that our competitors are already seizing.

Geopolitics is saying the same thing out loud, for those willing to listen beyond the climate activism echo chamber. J.P. Morgan bluntly calls this the “new energy security age,” and Europe is working frantically to end its dependence on Russian LNG—not for climate reasons, but for survival. Japan is expanding its LNG fleet, and Mexico is inking billion-dollar supply deals while climate campaigners aren’t looking. Strip away all the green branding and virtue-signalling, and you get a core calculation that energy security is nothing short of national security—and countries that get snookered by activist rhetoric into forgetting that harsh reality lose far more than bragging rights at international summits.

The Woodfibre LNG site is seen on Howe Sound in Squamish, B.C. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Our allies have been leaning on us to quit sitting on the sidelines and deliver something concrete. And back home, even Ottawa’s mandarins are finally muttering what everyone else has known all along. For the next several years, at minimum, gas remains the most economical, rock-solid baseload option across vast stretches of the continent. Meeting that surging demand would deliver high-paying jobs, bulletproof alliances, and slash global emissions compared to the world burning more coal. Turning our backs on it means standing idle while rival producers rush to fill the void—all so we can pat ourselves on the back for warming the bench.

If this strikes you as abstract theorizing, cast your eyes toward California. A righteous crusade to shutter refineries didn’t magically eliminate the appetite for fuel—it simply exported the dirty work elsewhere, shipping out the jobs and the supply cushion that shields consumers from price shocks. The Golden State now scrambles like a panicked shopper whenever supply chains hiccup, because when push comes to shove, affordability draws the hard red line on what voters will tolerate. Meanwhile, the global landscape has shifted dramatically, with the United States now claiming the crown as top exporter of refined petroleum and LNG.

The lofty rhetoric of “climate solidarity” has quietly faded into something far more practical—nations ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. Even the most progressive speechwriters now pepper their drafts with buzzwords like ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism.’ It represents nothing short of a grudging acknowledgment that wishful thinking won’t keep the lights on when the grid starts groaning.

British Columbia, meanwhile, sits perched atop the Montney—one of the continent’s most spectacular gas reservoirs—boasting the shortest shipping lanes to Asian markets. Indigenous nations are shrewdly securing equity stakes in LNG ventures while demanding genuine partnership—a blueprint that marries reconciliation with cold, hard prosperity. Those outbound cargoes are displacing coal-fired power overseas. If your genuine goal involves slashing real-world emissions, that achievement trumps a dozen flowery Ottawa press releases.

So no, the magic formula isn’t “all of the above,” but rather “the best of the above.” It demands deploying hydro, nuclear, and renewables where they deliver maximum punch, with natural gas serving as the indispensable bridge that keeps systems humming while breakthrough technologies mature. We must construct infrastructure that performs when sidewalks turn into skating rinks and when asphalt starts melting like butter.

We’ve also absorbed some hard-earned lessons about the political theatrics that spook serious capital. At COP28 in Dubai, then–environment minister Steven Guilbeault sported a baseball cap emblazoned with “emissions.” Emissions cap—catch the clever wordplay? The joke bombed spectacularly with investors. The policy proposal fared no better; its most vocal champion is reportedly eyeing the exit door, while nearly a hundred Canadian oil and gas CEOs have now fired off two blunt open letters to the new prime minister, spelling out precisely what the cap would accomplish: driving investors to pack their bags for friendlier jurisdictions. If your economic blueprint hinges on attracting capital, avoid crafting policies that essentially scream ‘beat it.’

World leaders at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Energy abundance, properly managed, isn’t just Canada’s strategic edge—it’s our ace in the hole while allies scramble to rearm their energy systems and competitors sprint ahead. We can keep sleepwalking through the annual ritual of self-imposed shackles, watching golden opportunities slip through our fingers, or we can finally show up as a serious player in the energy security game we’re already knee-deep in.

What would that look like at COP30? It would sound nothing like the strangely self-defeating Canadian speeches of years past, which have been heavy on confessional hand-wringing, light on genuine intent, drowning in performative self-flagellation, and starved of actual competence. If Ottawa wants to prove it has finally woken up from its ideological slumber, it should ditch the tired theatre and roll out policies that actually unleash investment instead of strangling it: streamlined approvals with firm timelines that mean something; predictable fiscal treatment that doesn’t shift with every political breeze; a clear path for Indigenous equity in major projects; and an explicit commitment to “best of the above” power and fuels. Pair that with a forthright message to allies that cuts through the usual diplomatic fog: Canada intends to supply reliable, cleaner energy to the democracies that desperately need it.

It’s not capitulating to industry to stop pretending we can wish away reality. It’s the path that lets us grow the economy, slash global emissions faster than sanctimonious lectures ever will, and strengthen the alliances that keep free countries from getting steamrolled. If we want Canada to matter in this new energy security age instead of being relegated to the sidelines, we should start acting like we mean business. COP30 is the stage. Time to scrap the old script and write one that actually works.

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Business

Major Projects Office Another Case Of Liberal Political Theatre

Published on October 16, 2025

By

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Ottawa’s Major Projects Office is a fix for a mess the Liberals created—where approval now hinges on politics, not merit.

They are repeating their same old tricks, dressing up political favouritism as progress instead of cutting barriers for everyone

On Sept. 11, the Prime Minister’s Office announced five projects being examined by its Major Projects Office, all with the potential to be fast-tracked for approval and to get financial help. However, no one should get too excited. This is only a bad effort at fixing what government wrecked.

During the Trudeau years, and since, the Liberals have created a regulatory environment so daunting that companies need a trump card to get anything done. That’s why the Major Projects Office (MPO) exists.

“The MPO will work to fast-track nation-building projects by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing, in close partnership with provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples and private investors,” explains a government press release.

Canadians must not be fooled. A better solution would be to create a regulatory and tax environment where these projects can meet market demand through private investment. We don’t have that in Canada, which is why money has fled the country and our GDP growth per capita is near zero.

Instead of this less politicized and more even-handed approach, the Liberals have found a way to make their cabinet the only gatekeepers able to usher someone past the impossible process they created. Then, having done so, they can brag about what “they” got done.

The Fraser Institute has called out this system for its potential to incentivize bribes and kickbacks. The Liberals have such a track record of handing out projects and even judicial positions to their friends that such scenarios become easier to believe. Innumerable business groups will be kissing up to the Liberals just to get anything major done.

The government has created the need for more of itself, and it is following up in every way it can. Already, the federal government has set up offices across Canada for people to apply for such projects. Really? Anyone with enough dollars to pursue a major project can fly to Ottawa to make their pitch.

No, this is as much about the show as it is about results—and probably much more. It is all too reminiscent of another big-sounding, mostly ineffective program the Liberal government rolled out in 2017. They announced a $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative “designed to help strengthen Canada’s most promising clusters … while positioning Canadian firms for global leadership.”

That program allowed any company in the world to participate, with winners getting matching dollars from taxpayers for their proposals. (But all for the good of Canada, we were told.) More than 50 applications were made for these sweepstakes, which included more than 1,000 businesses and 350 other participants. In Trudeau Liberal fashion, every applicant had to articulate how their proposal would increase female jobs and leadership and encourage diversity in the long term.

The entire process was like one big Dragon’s Den series. The Liberals trotted out a list of contestants full of nice-sounding possibilities, with maximum hype and minimal reality. Late in the process, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains picked the nine finalists himself (all based in cities with a Liberal MP), from which five would be chosen.

The alleged premise was to leverage local and regional commercial clusters, but that soon proved ridiculous. The “Clean, Low-energy, Effective and Remediated Supercluster” purported to power clean growth in mining in Ontario, Quebec and Vancouver. Not to be outdone, the “Mobility Systems and Technologies for the 21st Century Supercluster” included all three of these locations, plus Atlantic Canada. They were only clustered by their tendency to vote Liberal.

Today, the MPO repeats this virtue-signalling, politicking, drawn-out, tax-dollar-spending drama. The Red Chris Mine expansion in northwest British Columbia is one of the proposals under consideration. It would be done in conjunction with the Indigenous Tahltan Nation and is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent. That’s right up the Liberal alley.

Meanwhile, the project is somehow part of a proposed Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor that would cordon off an area the size of Greece from development. Is this economic growth or economic prohibition? This approach is more like the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 than it is nation-building. And it is more like the World Economic Forum’s “stakeholder capitalism” approach than it is free enterprise.

At least there are two gems among the five proposals. One is to expand capacity at the Port of Montreal, and another is to expand the Canada LNG facility in Kitimat, B.C. Both have a market case and clear economic benefits.

Even here, Canadians must ask themselves, why must the government use a bulldozer to get past the red tape it created? Why not cut the tape for everyone? The Liberals deserve little credit for knocking down a door they barred themselves.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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