Thomas McMillan was the Progressive Conservative environmental minister for the Mulroney government and the person who might be said to be the closest thing to the architect of its environmental achievements. According to McMillan, those achievements were simply a matter of political will. “Acid rain was a huge issue…Pierre Trudeau didn’t take it seriously,” he said in an interview with The Hub. “Mulroney made it a major issue—the major issue even over free trade in his summits with Reagan. It was a test of American-Canadian relations.”

In 2019, Corporate Knights, a company that represents Fortune 500-type companies committed to sustainability, recognized McMillan with its Award of Distinction for his role in the Montreal Protocol. The article they ran was titled “The man who fixed the hole in the sky.”

As McMillan explains it, the reason Canada was chosen to host the conference was because several of the world’s top scientists on the issue at the time were Canadian. The government, under Mulroney’s leadership, made it a point to pay attention to them.

“These people were telling, initially me, that this needs to be dealt with and then I got the prime minister interested, and he got the cabinet involved,” McMillan said. “They explained it in layman’s terms: the ozone layer shields the human population from the most lethal cancer-causing rays of the sun. If the hole got bigger, we were doomed. That’s all we really needed to know.”

It all feels deceptively straightforward in his retelling. The fact that today, all but two percent of the offending substances have been eliminated from the atmosphere (“And we’re close to eliminating those,” he adds) overlooks the massive complexity, unprecedented international cooperation (Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, two figures not exactly known for their environmental policy, were also signatories to the protocol), and the enormous cost ($135 billion worth of machinery in the U.S. alone had to be retrofitted or replaced) that came with fixing that hole in the sky. According to McMillan, “No problem is so big, or so complex, or so politically sensitive that it can’t be solved through sheer political will and leadership and international action.”

The movement goes West

In 1993, nine years after Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won the second-largest majority in Canadian history, the party came crashing back to earth, losing all but two of its 156 seats. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals were elected, but the second greatest upward swing went to the Reform Party, going from just a single seat in Parliament to 52.

“There are positives to be taken from the Mulroney years,” said Preston Manning in an interview with The Hub, but he also suggested Mulroney’s brand of conservatism has been left in the past.

Manning was the founder of the Reform Party of Canada, a party that precipitated the move of the Conservative Party away from Ottawa and into the heart of oil country in Western Canada.

The Reform Party is responsible for the brand of Western populism now associated with the modern Conservative Party. As a political movement, its rise can in part be seen as a response to the National Energy Program, a now infamous piece of legislation brought in by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals to increase Canadian ownership of the oil industry and manage energy prices. It was widely viewed as an egregious federal overstep into the affairs of the oil-producing provinces which, through price controls and revenue sharing, began making disproportionate economic contributions. Between 1980 and 1985, the years the program was in effect, Alberta lost between $50 and $100 billion.

Manning gave this rising tide of Western alienation a political vessel. He is from Alberta, the son of former premier Ernest Manning. In the 1990s, he took a strong stand against the Kyoto Protocol, the spiritual successor to the Montreal Protocol of the 1980s, an international framework that attempted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 1997, he took Chrétien to task for the proposed “gasoline tax” that would raise prices at the pump, a consequence of the international agreement.

And yet, these days Manning is known as one of the movement’s most prominent green advocates including for a price on pollution. “If Canada ever winds up with a carbon tax, the country’s Conservative godfather should get much of the credit,” wrote the National Post in 2015.

The issue at the time, just as it is now, was the same: a price on pollution can make life more expensive for average Canadians.

Zero-sum policy?

The environmental file was subordinated in favour of economic development by Conservatives during the Harper years. Stephen Harper began his political career in the Reform Party and brokered the merger of the Canadian Alliance Party (the successor of the Reform Party) and the Progressive Conservatives to form the modern Conservative Party.

He came to office in 2006 with a vision of the country as a “new energy superpower” in which Canada’s oil and gas resources were fundamental to its economic interests. Natural resource development was key to Harper’s economic strategy and his government’s own self-image.

Yet, in the early years of his tenure as prime minister, he seemed to balance this perspective with a parallel focus on environmental issues. In 2007, in Germany, he described climate change as, “Perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today,” adding that “We owe it to future generations to do whatever we can to address this world problem.”

Harper did have some notable environmental achievements. In 2006, his government played a key role in the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement, a landmark accord that placed 6.4 million hectares of coastal rainforest in B.C. under Indigenous-led, ecosystem-based management. In March 2007, his government introduced $4.5 billion in spending “to clean our air and water, reduce greenhouse gasses and combat climate change.” Even as late as 2014, Harper expressed interest in Alberta’s industrial model on carbon pricing which he said could “go broader.”

But the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline in 2012 caused the Harper government to prioritize pipeline construction in order to export Canadian energy to China and other markets. It led most notably to sweeping legislative changes to environmental laws which the government wanted to expedite project approvals. The 400-page document tabled in Parliament faced major criticism from environmental groups.

In 2011, the government made the controversial decision to exercise its legal right to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, with the environment minister at the time saying it would spare the country $14 billion in penalties for failing to meet their targets. Canada was the first and only country in the world to formally repudiate the agreement.

“The first thing to remember is that Harper was an economist and his primary concerns were fiscal and economic,” Manning said in an interview. “I believe he shared our concerns about environmental protection generally but what he would be most interested in would be the economic impacts of any particular environmental protection measure…”

Harper had always been critical of the Kyoto Protocol. He argued it couldn’t succeed because it didn’t ask enough of the world’s largest polluters, namely the U.S., India, and China. He accused his predecessors in the Liberal government of signing the accord and then failing to take any meaningful action to meet the targets.

Manning, for his part, maintained as late as 2015 that the Kyoto Protocol was “a hackneyed and insincere agreement doomed to fail.”

The matter of investment

Pierre Poilievre is a political descendant of Harper and Manning. Born and raised in Calgary, he was attending Reform Party conventions when he was just 17. He was a minister in Harper’s government, and though he has not yet released a climate platform beyond his promises to repeal the carbon tax, it seems safe to assume he would be mostly hands-off. He has said of the climate crisis, “We are going to use technology instead of taxes.”

In June 2023, when he was challenged in Parliament about how exactly he would do this, Poilievre suggested he would bring back a tidal power project in Nova Scotia that was scuttled after years of regulatory delays. He suggested they would help build more hydroelectric dams in Quebec, and pointed to new deals signed by provinces to build small nuclear reactors.

But beyond these comments, there has been little in the way of solid policy commitments. “You can’t just sit around and wait for technology to happen,” said Ragan. “I mean you can, but it’s not a policy.”

Ragan suggests that one of the reasons Poilievre has avoided any firm commitments is because once you begin to drill down on the details of, say, plans to invest in clean technology—from carbon sequestration to electric vehicles—it also turns out to be far more interventionist than traditional conservative approaches. “It is very expensive, and it involves the government sort of picking winners,” he said.

Ragan was chief among a group of economists who recently signed a letter endorsing a carbon tax as an effective economic measure to lower emissions. Poilievre wasted no time blasting the signatories on that letter as “so-called experts” and promised to listen to “the common sense of the common people.”

But this framing is flawed, not because many ordinary Canadians are not affected by the tax, but because those people are also demanding cost-effective solutions that are—to quote Stephen Harper—“Perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today.”

Manning has recognized this, telling the National Post that his position on climate change comes directly from Canada’s conservative heartland: B.C. loggers who said the winters weren’t cold enough to kill the pine beetle or Manitoba ice road truckers who saw their seasons shortened. “There are a lot of people who work with the environment, in the environment, and have integrated it with their own economic activity,” he said. “Those are the real allies. Those people are totally committed to conservation.”

There is a “tight and all-pervasive inter-relationship” between the economy and the environment, Manning wrote the following year in a piece titled “Cultivating a Green Conservatism.” “The economy draws all its resources from this planet’s soil, minerals, vegetation, water, and atmosphere and discharges all its wastes into various ecosystems with finite carrying capacities,” he wrote. “From this perspective, environmental conservation and protection is an integral feature of every economic function.”

The climate crisis is now the most pressing and complex environmental problem we have ever faced and, by extension, it is arguably among the most pressing and complex economic problems we have ever faced.

The unalterable fact is that there is a tremendous cost associated with decarbonizing our world and the cost of failing to do so—in Canada and around the world—may be even greater. The political capital that Poilievre has built vowing to “Axe the Tax” will run out unless he offers meaningful alternatives to it; wildfires will burn hotter and longer, what were once once-in-a-generation weather events will become unsettlingly common occurrences, and the price tag to fix these and a vast range of interrelated issues will grow beyond our ability to pay.

Many Canadians understand this. They will expect their leaders to as well.