After Mark Carney’s speech at the Davos Economic Forum went viral, with many around the world singing his praises, Green Party leader Elizabeth May said she was “speechless at his betrayal” to climate issues back home.
In the season two premiere of Ricochet’s podcast In Bed with the Elephant, host Adrian Harewood sat down with May to discuss her 50-year career as an environmental activist and politician. Beyond reflecting on her decades-long journey, May had plenty to say about Carney’s roll-back of Liberal climate policies, and she expressed particular frustration with the recent Canada-Alberta memorandum of understanding to clear the path for a new pipeline and increased fossil fuel extraction.
“I’ve never seen any other government in this country reverse a budgetary commitment within 10 days without any explanation, without any apology,” said May.
The MOU came just 10 days after Carney passed his federal budget. Former Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault resigned shortly after its signing. He told Radio-Canada/CBC that Carney’s recent decisions make it impossible to meet the government’s 2030 climate target.
Guilbeault was instrumental in securing May’s vote to get the federal budget passed.
“Nobody from the PMO reached out to me to say, ‘we really appreciated your vote on the budget. Sorry we screwed you over,’” she said.
The MOU outlines a plan to build a new bitumen pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the B.C. coast, despite objections from Coastal First Nations. It states that Canada will extend tax credits and other policy support for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), including enhanced oil recovery (EOR), another application of CCUS, which experts say, is “fairytale” technology that only serves to propagate the continued production of fossil fuels.
May called Carney’s extractive ambitions “a suicide pact.”
“For anyone who cares that our grandchildren have a livable world, that requires us to reduce greenhouse gas gasses as quickly as possible everywhere. Every fraction of a degree we avoid in global heating will save millions of lives,” she said.
In Carney’s Davos speech, he emphasized the importance of maintaining “Canadian values” and advocating for a “values-based foreign policy” in his diplomacy. He even talked about a “Canadian commitment to sustainability.”
May says she is deeply disappointed and “astonished” by Carney’s reversal of a number of key climate policies in Canada.
“The very modest consumer carbon tax… to my horror, one of Carney’s first acts was to get rid of it,” she said. “As an economist he knows perfectly well that that was the least costly and most efficient way to reduce greenhouses. It doesn’t matter. It got demonized by slogans that rhyme, and slogans that rhyme carry greater resonance than mountains of scientific evidence.”
And, she said, it’s a policy reversal that people in Canada probably don’t want to believe is happening.
“Canadians think we are doing a better job than we are, in contrast to the United States, especially with Trump,” she said. “Canadians assume our leaders stand up for human rights. Except we don’t particularly.”
Canada’s environmental protection laws are now subject to new legislation passed by Carney’s government last year that allows the government to get around environmental laws, species protection and treaty rights. “Now he can break any of these laws if he decides they want to build something big and do it fast. They don’t have to obey any of our laws,” she said.
May says that Carney has a reputation as a thoughtful economist, but she views him as a “short-term transactional banker.”
Still, as a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, who has participated in numerous climate conferences and understands the science, May hoped Carney would bring evidence-based climate knowledge and solutions to his leadership as prime minister.
“Clearly, I was wrong. I cannot take him at his word.”
Listen to the full episode of In Bed with The Elephant on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
