One line in particular stood out from Dominic LeBlanc’s appearance before a House of Commons committee last week to answer questions about how the government managed to give Canadian citizenship to accused terrorist Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi. It was his insistence that the fact that Eldidi and his son were arrested hours before they were able to commit a mass-casualty attack, meant that “this is the way that the investigative national security system should work.”

“Relax, everyone!” the minister of Public Safety seemed to be saying. “No one died. No need to get all hepped up.” His performance was just a short step from the “nothing to see here” meme. Unsurprisingly, LeBlanc’s mellow emollience didn’t satisfy the Conservative Opposition, who seized on the phrase in their questioning and later in incredulous social media posts.

For those new to the story, Eldidi apparently starred in an ISIS video in 2015, in which he dismembered a body with a sword. It’s not clear whether the victim was still living. Nevertheless, according to the chronology read out at the committee hearing, the federal government gave him a travel visa to come to Canada in 2018, refugee status in 2019, permanent residency in 2021, and finally citizenship in 2024.

And, as several outlets have reported (and LeBlanc did not deny) Eldidi was only caught at the last moment when another country tipped us off to what he and his son were up to here in Scarborough. If this is the system working, I’d hate to see it when it’s broken.

Only when pressed did LeBlanc say that officials are “moving rapidly to make the necessary changes to our systems so as to strengthen them.” But if the system worked as intended, why the need for change, let alone rapid change? The reason is obvious: because this is emphatically not how the security and immigration service should work. So why didn’t he just say that?

A few of LeBlanc’s colleagues on the committee tried to come to his aid, arguing feebly that the system can only work with the information available and maybe the video wasn’t online in 2018, 2019, 2021, or 2024. Spare me. A system that fails four times before being bailed out by a deus ex machina from a foreign country is so broken that it hardly qualifies to be called a system.

I was actually surprised that LeBlanc of all people went along with the bureaucratic line that the system worked as intended. He’s a political vet, considered one of the savvier operators in the Trudeau cabinet. And yet even as irrefutable evidence of the system’s failure was staring up at him from his briefing notes, he was happy to read out the system’s own line about the system’s success.

LeBlanc should have known better. Ministers denying the obvious helps no one: not the Canadian people who know a goof-up when they see it; not the minister who looks like a fool for ignoring the self-evident goof-up; and not the system, which can sweep the goof-up under the rug and move on to the next one and the one after that.

If this were just about an immigration screening system that is apparently unable to screen out hardened terrorists from the crowds of visitors the government is currently waving into the country, that would be bad enough. But this passive and incurious “all protocols were followed” approach has become endemic across government, and we are all suffering the effects.

Immigration fraud detection fails to detect fraud; procurement doesn’t procure; service standards provide substandard services; repeat offenders are released to offend repeatedly; building budgets balloon without building anything; and the Rube Goldberg machinery of government keeps gasping and chugging along.

If nothing seems to work anymore, one reason is because no one is accountable for things working anymore. Nor is this a problem only for governments. Corporations have become so large they have developed their own bureaucracies, which have in turn developed their own butt-covering protocols.

In a new book, The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies offers the provocative thesis that “any organisation in a modern industrial society will tend to restructure itself so as to reduce the amount of personal responsibility attributable to its actions…until crisis results.” “In short,” as Ed Smith writes in a savvy review of Davies’s book, “systems naturally evolve into unaccountability machines.” If that doesn’t sound like our federal government, then you obviously haven’t dealt with it recently.

Trudeau and LeBlanc obviously aren’t interested in fixing the problem, so it will fall to the next government to smash the government unaccountability machine. It should start by not reflexively defending the system when it fails and by reintroducing the idea of responsibility in government. And if the system has become so opaque that it’s impossible to allocate blame for errors, then start at the top and incentivise each level to root out the problems below it.

This means that there must be consequences for failure: from an end to automatic bonuses for officials leading underperforming departments to terminations when public servants have clearly failed right up to resignations—forced if necessary—when ministers have superintended failure. Especially if their reaction to that failure is to insist that the system is working as intended.

A majority of Canadians think that Canada is broken after years of stagnant incomes, affordability challenges, rising crime, government failures on basic functions like healthcare and immigration, and a deepening cultural malaise. But decline is a choice, and better public policies are needed to overcome Canada’s many challenges. Kickstart Canada brings together leading voices in academia, think tanks, and business to lay out an optimistic vision for Canada’s future, providing the policy ideas that governments need to ensure a bright future for all Canadians.

Pop quiz: which province was the first jurisdiction in North America to introduce a carbon pricing system? Which province has reduced the most emissions since the Paris Accord was signed in 2015? Which province accounted for over 92 percent of Canada’s overall renewable energy growth and energy storage capacity in 2023?

The answer to all of these questions is Alberta.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the province is a climate-denying hellscape; it is often portrayed that way. But there’s an argument to be made that the energy province has made investments and policies that will contribute more to reaching net zero globally than anywhere else in Canada.

As the federal Conservatives determine what their approach to climate policy will be, they could do a lot worse than look to Alberta, a jurisdiction that is approaching the issue through a lens of innovation and competitiveness rather than degrowth and subsidies, and finding success.

Climate policy is at a crossroads. Literally trillions of dollars have been spent on efforts to reduce global emissions, and yet they grow inexorably. Almost ten years on from Paris, it is not just climate skeptics who are asking to reassess the conventional wisdom on achieving net zero.

Canada is Exhibit A of the road to hell being paved by good climate intentions. While climate action has come to define the Trudeau government’s legacy, it is hardly worth emulating. The prosperous economy and healthy environment we were promised would go hand in hand are not manifesting. Instead, Canadian climate policy has entailed a mix of expensive subsidies, regulations, and mandates that have mostly served to stifle competitiveness, reward rent-seeking, and undermine federalism. And we suffer from global warming all the same.

Perhaps predictably, this has led to growing skepticism amongst Canadian voters for more of the same climate policy. While a majority still believe that climate change is an issue, its relative importance to the electorate has fallen alongside Canada’s GDP per capita. According to polling by Angus Reid, those who say the environment is a top issue has fallen by exactly half from the wake of the 2019 election (42 percent) to today (21 percent).

Amidst all this, it may be tempting for a Conservative government-in-waiting to focus on the issues that will win or lose the next election: affordability, housing, and immigration. Climate policy is not their strength, and their base does not think it matters much. Indeed many conservatives see “climate policy” as an expensive, virtue-signalling excuse for a privileged elite to rejig society and the economy in ways that suit their narrow interests while providing nothing for the common people.

As much as this is true, leaving a hole where a conservative climate policy should be would be a mistake. Climate change is real, it is expensive, and it is a significant factor in global business and politics. Doing and saying nothing is not the option that best advances Canada’s—or conservatives’—interests.

Climate thought leadership in Canada has largely been left to progressives, to the detriment of all. As with any significant policy area that does not benefit from the input and expertise of a diversity of stakeholders, it has led to weak and ideological positions. Policy generation at the federal level has been dominated by environmental activists, bureaucrats, and academics. These are all valuable contributors to society; but an understanding of how to design, build, finance, and sustain energy and transportation systems is not their forte.

This is where Alberta comes in. Whatever your political stripe, you must acknowledge that there are people in the province who know energy inside and out: how to produce it, move it, sell it, and use it. And because energy and climate policy have become closely linked, a lot of people in Alberta are doing a lot of thinking about climate change and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. (I submit that those working in the oil and gas business know more about climate change than those working in climate change know about the oil and gas business.) Because the province is full of engineers, geologists, chemists, and entrepreneurs, they’ve developed a lot of great, practical ideas about how to reduce, capture, and store GHGs.

And here’s the lesson: Alberta’s conservative political bent and oil and gas economic bent have not prevented it from meaningfully and thoughtfully engaging in climate policy. In fact, it has made it a leader in many decarbonisation technologies that are scalable, transferable, and profitable.

There’s no reason why federal conservatives can’t own the environment as an issue as well, following common principles: the prioritization of innovation and competitiveness as the best path towards decarbonisation, rather than subsidies and heavy-handed regulation.

Alberta’s climate policy has treated the private sector as an asset, not an adversary, to achieving its goals, supporting its energy sector to be better, not smaller. Emissions intensity per barrel in the Alberta oil sands has declined by 23 percent since 2009 and emissions have now decoupled from production growth.

Similarly, Alberta was the first oil and gas-producing jurisdiction to put requirements on emissions from flaring (back in the 1990s), and the first regional government in North America to set a methane emissions reduction target for the oil and gas sector. It has subsequently reduced methane emissions by 45 percent since 2014. Earlier this year it phased out the last of its coal-powered electricity generation, hastened by strong renewables growth.

The province has invested in organisations such as Alberta Innovates and Emissions Reduction Alberta to help develop a vibrant clean tech sector with leadership in hydrogen, carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), geothermal, carbon-based materials, and more. The world’s first net zero petrochemical complex is being built near Edmonton, an $8.9 billion investment by Dow, a reminder that good policy is good business.

Public sector funding for research and development has been bolstered by private sector investments, supported by North America’s first industrial carbon pricing system. Carbon pricing in Alberta was first initiated in 2007 and has largely been insulated from partisan politicking, surviving Progressive Conservative, NDP, and UCP governments. According to analysis by the Canadian Climate Institute earlier this year, industrial carbon pricing is the single biggest driver of emissions reductions in Canada. This is precisely because it incentivizes improved performance rather than punishing consumers for using energy.

The point is not to characterize Alberta’s climate and energy policies as perfect; they’re not.

But they are good, and they have been successful at reducing emissions while maintaining a strong provincial economy. The oil and gas industry has been a willing partner not because it is run by out-of-touch, ESG-obsessed CEOs, but because a credible climate plan is necessary for them to compete: both to attract investment, talent and customers, as well as to earn social license, including from Indigenous rights holders, to operate.

Alberta’s climate and energy policies are very different from the current federal government’s because they believe not only in the science but also the math. You need to be profitable in order to be sustainable. Progressives’ preferred climate strategies eventually run out of other people’s money and fail. Alberta’s approach seeks to leverage, rather than phase out, its incredible energy endowment and take constructive measures to decarbonise.

What conservative wouldn’t want Canada’s oil and gas to be the most environmentally responsible in the world?

It is essential that global climate and energy policies start to recalibrate towards pragmatism. Conservatives may be tempted to give up on the issue altogether, so polarised and ideological has the climate debate become.

The better approach is to be more active in shaping it. If Danielle Smith and the UCP can win in Alberta on an emissions reduction plan that aspires to achieve a carbon neutral economy by 2050 while ensuring an affordable, reliable and secure energy supply, the math tells me that federal Conservatives can too.