Mark Carney launched his political career just over three months ago with some counterintuitive policy promises. Notwithstanding his strong environmental track record, he committed to repealing the Trudeau government’s unpopular consumer carbon tax, streamlining the permitting process for major resource projects, and building new energy infrastructure, including more pipelines. These surprising announcements were crucial to distinguishing Carney from his predecessor and establishing his bona fides as a political moderate.
Yet as the election has gone, he’s reverted to his past self. His promise to deregulate the regulatory and permitting processes has been replaced by a defence of the Trudeau government’s Bill C-69, which has not only been ruled unconstitutional in part, but is also widely seen as a major impediment to resource development. He’s committed to preserving the highly costly emission caps on the oil and gas sector. And he’s even been deliberately obscure about whether he supports new pipeline projects at all. In Quebec over the weekend, for instance, he drew on Mackenzie King’s famous doublespeak about conscription when he said: “Not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines, we’ll see.”
At this point, it’s virtually impossible to understand the distinction between Carney’s views on resource development and Justin Trudeau’s. The former has effectively shed his moderate cloak. It turns out that environmental radicals like Steven Guilbeault are still writing Liberal policy on these issues.
This, by the way, is far more consistent with Carney’s past views on resource development in general and oil and gas development in particular. He has long been dismissive of investment in Canada’s oil sands on the basis that fossil fuels will need to be phased out over the next decade or two. He’s also doubted the economics of LNG projects because they should have a life of only 15 to 20 years. Carney’s notion of a so-called “managed phase out” is a sign that he believes governments, rather than markets, are the ones who ought to be making these judgements.
But there’s no question that he believes that these judgements need to be made. This is Carney’s most consistent view. In articles, speeches, and books, he’s reliably argued that most of the world’s oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground in order to meet our collective climate goals. In his 2021 book, Values, for instance, he made the rather blunt case that 80 percent of current fossil fuel reserves—including half of gas and one third of oil—must go undeveloped.
He’s even told business leaders, investors, and policymakers that new oil and gas pipelines are a bad investment—or at least a “high-risk” one—because government policy must ultimately render them uneconomical.
Why, then, would we assume that his views have changed since he entered politics? What would cause us to think that as prime minister, Carney would support pipeline projects that he’s previously characterized as the “tragedy of the horizon”?
It matters because in this election campaign, he’s seeking a governing mandate while minimizing as much as possible the details of his own policy ambitions. Most of Carney’s promises thus far could be effectuated in a single budget. Then what? What will animate the next three-and-a-half years in office? His body of speeches and writings points in one direction: climate change and the energy transition.
As The Hub’s economics and business editor, Theo Argitis, has set out, Carney’s foray into politics isn’t to be a caretaker prime minister—he aspires, in Argitis’ words, to be “an architect of economic transformation.” In particular, he wants to bring expression to his theory of the case about markets, government, and the nexus between energy and the environment. If Trudeau conceived of Canada as a “post-national state,” Carney aspires for Canada to be a post-fossil fuels economy.
This would clearly have major consequences for the country, including for economic activity, exports, and employment—particularly in Western Canada where the oil and gas sector is (directly and indirectly) responsible for something like 10 to 20 percent of total employment.
Think about it this way: Alberta alone has proven oil reserves estimated at 160 billion barrels (fourth largest in the world) and natural gas reserves estimated to be 130 trillion cubic feet. Based on 2025 market prices, these reserves could be worth more than $9 trillion.
If Carney and the Liberals believe that we ought to leave some or all of these reserves in the ground and forgo their economic value, then that’s presumably something that we ought to be debating in the campaign. As an act of economic harm, the costs and consequences could far exceed Trump’s tariffs.
There’s an onus, therefore, on Carney to abandon doublespeak and communicate clearly about his governing intentions with respect to the oil and gas sector. If he really believes that Canada’s oil and gas reserves must be stranded—if they’re “literally unburnable” as he’s put it—then voters deserve to know.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well…
