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.
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