Climate Policy versus Climate Politics

[00:00:00]I think that the distinction between the two liberal governments in my mind is that the Trudeau people were were very good and very interested in doing climate policy.

[00:00:10]The Carney people are doing climate politics. And and those are different things and and you know, I think we can see now with the benefit of hindsight that that the mistake that the Trudeau team made was really creating a lot of targets for political attack, for misinformation.

[00:00:28]Um you know, I don't think I don't think either one of us is is laboring under the belief that the criticisms of the carbon tax were correct or legitimate.

[00:00:34]You know, most of it was made up out of thin air, but it worked. Uh it it almost dragged that government under the water.

[00:00:40]And so what the Carney team is doing, and I think it's mostly Carney himself, it is sort of disguising their climate policy under, as you say, sort of economic objectives. And and that's polit- climate politics. It's getting people excited about not the sort of moral benefits of climate policy or the long-term benefits, but the like right now benefits. Uh we're going to build some things, we're going to stimulate the economy, my kids are going to get jobs, um we're going to make ourselves more independent from the Americans.

[00:01:09]These are all near-term political concerns that are being quietly met through climate policy. And and no, it doesn't have the the sort of virtue signaling aspect of the Trudeau years, but it also doesn't have the target identification aspect, either.

[00:01:24]>> Max, we need to go back 10 years because you and I were working in, you know, we were reporting on the Alberta oil and gas industry back when uh Alberta Premier Rachel Notley brought in the climate plan, introduced the industrial carbon pri- pricing. I mean, the modern site, the uh that came with climate plan. And I interviewed uh Suncor, Cenovus, um CAP.

[00:01:51]Everybody was on board with climate policies because they said, "We need to be carbon and cost competitive going forward." So, I understand why the Trudeau government did what it did, and its policy approach at that time was accepted. Uh it came to, you know, that evolved, obviously, but this business of of demonizing the Trudeau government, uh I I was never on board with that. I thought that it became outdated and it became it should have been modernized. I like Carney's approach better, but I think historians are going to be much kinder to to Trudeau than uh than contemporaries are.

[00:02:31]>> I think that's probably true. Um historians don't have to concern themselves with winning elections and and things of that nature. You know, I I I'm not interested in demonizing them, but I do think that they failed to learn the lessons of the climate leadership plan and and, you know, the the climate leadership plan was very much a top-down um sort of elite consensus sort of positioning of here's what we're doing, we have these people on the stage with us, the oil and gas companies are supporting it, ergo it's done, we don't need to fight this anymore. And what conservatives are very good at understanding, very good, is you can sort of you can lose a battle and still win the war. And that's what they did with carbon pri- with the consumer carbon prices. They accepted defeat in the battle, you know, the NDP was the provincial government, the Liberals were the federal government, you know, we're going to have to kind of pull our horns in here, but all the while they were they were building forces to fight the the next battles and ultimately win the war, and that's what they did. They just kept attacking from behind, kept attacking from behind, uh and eventually one day the Trudeau government woke up and realized, "Oh, we're completely upside down on this issue um because we didn't do the work of building our own forces." Um and, you know, we I've talked about this before, I'm sure you have as well, uh you know, a lot of it was the you know, the the failure to communicate the rebate, to to force people to cash the checks, to identify where the money was coming from, and to do an advertising campaign that shamelessly drove home the point that that's where this money was coming from. And and so, I think the Carney government's not going to walk into those sort of traps. And and I know that's unsatisfying for a lot of people who are sort of in the purely academic climate community, but again, you're you're the choice in front of you is not um the Trudeau era policies or the Carney era policies. It's the Carney era policies or purely policies. Um and [clears throat] you know, Carney for for for all that he doesn't talk about climate policy, he is putting in in place some things that will have lasting lasting impact.