Carney’s “Values”: A new investigative series by True North that takes the Liberal leadership hopeful’s own words as a launch pad to uncover his beliefs, background and vision for the world.
Mark Carney once tried to convince the world to adopt carbon taxes. Today, he’s all but abandoned a significant pillar of carbon pricing in his bid to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Carney has chops in the climate finance scene. The former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, a UN Special Envoy for Climate Action, and an architect of global financial policies to combat climate change, Carney spent years evangelizing for carbon pricing as the backbone of any credible climate policy.
There’s no place where his net-zero agenda for the future is better summarized than in his 2021 book Value(s).
The man who once penned that “backtracking on ambitious climate agendas is more difficult if politicians share the same goals and expect to be held accountable” is, rather incredibly, backtracking on carbon taxes himself.
For years, Carney championed carbon pricing as the essential, unavoidable linchpin of responsible climate governance. In his own words, Carney wrote: “Meaningful carbon prices are a cornerstone of any effective climate policy framework.”
Carbon taxes, he insisted, should increase “in a gradual and predictable way to support an orderly adjustment to a net-zero carbon economy.”
To him, Canada’s federal carbon pricing scheme, first introduced by his fellow ideological traveller Prime Minister Justin Trudeau via the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act in 2018, was the exemplary standard Carney envisioned for the world.
“One of the most important initiatives is carbon pricing. The best approach is a revenue-neutral, progressive carbon tax,” wrote Carney.
“The future path for carbon prices should be predictable. The Canadian federal carbon pricing framework is a model for others. It has also carefully navigated the complexities of Canadian federalism.”
Throughout his 2021 book, Carney insisted the carbon tax would “grow jobs” and ensure Canadians were “made whole” financially.
“It will grow jobs while ensuring that the majority of Canadians are made whole through quarterly rebates of this price on pollution. Canadians will keep their money and have a clearer view on the price of carbon pollution today and in the future…” he wrote.
Of course, it was the same message being peddled by the Liberal government as the federal carbon pricing scheme awoke resentment in a majority of the Canadian electorate, who wanted to see the tax scrapped. In an attempt to salvage the policy, the Liberals contrived the “Canada Carbon Rebate” re-branding effort, but the marketing strategy fell on deaf ears.
The truth was out – subsequent reports by the Parliamentary Budget Officer painted a clear picture: consumers paid hundreds of dollars more than the rebates they received. The carbon tax was not revenue-neutral.
Carney’s commitment to carbon pricing was never confined to Canada. In 2020, he launched the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, aimed at expanding global carbon trading mechanisms.
As co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, he brought together financial institutions to push carbon pricing as a necessary tool. Even in his work with former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on the G30’s Working Group on Climate Change and Finance, Carney insisted “carbon prices that increase in a gradual and predictable way are one key element of any policy package.”
Now, Carney is singing a different tune. Speaking at a campaign event in Halifax, he declared, if elected, he would “immediately remove” the consumer carbon tax, replacing it with an incentive program to “reward Canadians for making green choices.”
Gone is the language of shared accountability and an ironclad commitment to carbon pricing. Instead, he assures voters: “You’ll no longer have to pay more to fuel your car or heat your home.”
If this shift seems jarring, it’s because it is. Carney’s previous stance was explicit: “To tackle climate change, that would mean putting a price on carbon, so that the polluter (or ultimately the consumer of the polluter) pays.” What Carney wrote in his book was crystal clear.
Now, he contends that his reversal is necessitated by the policy’s divisiveness and the prevalence of “misinformation.” Only months ago, Trudeau was singing the same tune. At the recent G20 summit in Brazil, Trudeau similarly blamed “propaganda” and “misinformation” for Canadians’ displeasure towards carbon-pricing.
Yet the carbon tax’s unpopularity is hardly a revelation. Opposition to it has been mounting for years. Even before the Freedom Convoy, there was the “United We Roll” pro-pipeline and anti-carbon tax convoy which descended on Parliament Hill in 2019.
Now, recent polling suggests that a majority of Canadians increasingly reject it, seeing it as a financial burden rather than an environmental solution. If Carney’s past statements about “broad political support” being essential to credibility were sincere, why is he now abandoning ship when the policy has failed to generate that consensus?
If Carney believed that a predictable carbon tax was essential, that revenue neutrality was key, and that such policies required bipartisan consensus, how can he now claim abolishing the tax in favour of a vague reward-based system is the superior approach? Either his years of advocacy were wrong, or he is now engaged in the sort of political opportunism he previously condemned.
One of Carney’s past justifications for carbon pricing was its supposed fairness: “Carbon prices should be designed equitably—for example, by using proceeds to support low-income households.” But in his current pitch, there is no clarity on how the shift away from a carbon tax to an incentives-based system will work. Who will fund these incentives? Will industries pass on increased costs to consumers? Will “big polluters” actually pay more, or will they simply find ways to offload costs, as they always have?
True North asked Carney’s campaign these questions but was ignored.
These are not minor details—they are the very mechanics he proposes for a national policy. And for a man who built his reputation on the idea that a “gradual and predictable” approach is essential, his new plan is neither gradual nor predictable.
