Mark Carney is undoing Justin Trudeau’s legacy: 15 policy reversals from his first year in power

The new boss is not the same as the old boss. When he accepted the leadership of the Liberal party, Mark Carney said he didn’t have enough time to recognize all of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s various accomplishments. “You have transformed Canada,” he said. However, Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Liberal government are changing course on key policies from his predecessor. Here are the top 15 Trudeau-era policies Carney has reversed so far, as we approach the one-year anniversary of him in office. 1. Scrapping the consumer carbon tax Virtually immediately after being sworn in as the 24th prime minister, Carney signed a performative order paper to eliminate the consumer carbon tax on gasoline and home heating fuels by April 1, 2025. The Trudeau policy had become unpopular with the majority of the electorate and was hurting the Liberals at the polls. Carney kept the industrial carbon tax (Output-Based Pricing System), which the Conservatives have vowed to cut as well, arguing it makes Canada less competitive and causes consumer prices to go up. 2. Repealing the electric vehicle (EV) sales mandate  On February 5, Prime Minister Carney overturned Canada’s EV mandate requiring 20 percent of vehicles sold in Canada to be fully electric by 2026, with combustion vehicles being phased out of sales by 2035. Industry experts predicted Carney would have to scrap the Trudeau mandate because most automakers, including Canadian ones, were way behind the government’s targets. Adding to the pressure to drop the mandate, Carney made a trade deal with China to allow 49,000 Chinese vehicles into Canada in 2026 (and increasing the quota in subsequent years), which would mean the Chinese automakers could have received upwards of $1 billion in subsidies if the now-repealed EV sales mandate had stayed in effect. 3. Axing the 2 Billion Trees program In the 2025 budget, the Carney government revised the 2 Billion Trees program as part of broader efforts to reduce federal spending, dropping the target to plant one billion trees by 2030-31. The program had been plagued with challenges from the start, with the auditor general finding only 2.3 percent of promised trees were planted in the program’s first two years. So far, as of late 2025, the program has planted 228 million trees since the program was announced by Trudeau in 2019 alongside Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. 4. Dropping the Canada Greener Homes Grant  Carney’s first budget also wound down the Greener Homes Grant, which aimed to assist homeowners in renovating their homes with energy efficiency upgrades that provided up to $5,000 for retrofits. 5. Getting tougher on bail conditions The Carney government introduced Bill C-14 (Bail and Sentencing Reform Act) with significant amendments involving targeted changes to the Criminal Code. This included introducing reverse-onus bail for major crimes like violent auto theft, break and enter of a home, human trafficking and smuggling, violent and sexual assault, and extortion. In these cases, under the new legislation, the accused must prove they deserve bail rather than prosecutors having to prove detention is justified. Carney said his government was responding to concerns raised by municipalities, police, and provinces and that lessons were learned from the leniency of bail given to the accused during Trudeau’s government. Although the rate of those breaking bail conditions or committing further offences while on bail isn’t publicly available, recurring media reports show individuals with long criminal histories receiving bail and then committing heinous crimes while out of custody. For example, in late 2025, a Winnipeg offender arrested 16 times, who breached court orders 15 times and was convicted of nine violent offences, was released on bail and proceeded to commit a second-degree murder. Conservatives say the Carney government’s bail reforms only tighten bail at the margins, only involve certain serious offences, and do not overturn the “principle of restraint” from the earlier Trudeau reforms that gives judges too much discretion in offering bail to repeat offenders. 6. Removing the capital gains tax increase In the name of stimulating investment and making Canada more pro-business, Carney reversed the Trudeau government’s plans to bump up the capital gains tax from 50 percent to 66.7 percent on gains over $250,000. “What kind of a Canada do you want to live in?” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland asked critics of the tax hike at the time.“Do you want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry? Do you want to live in a country where a teenage girl gets pregnant just because she doesn’t have the money to buy birth control?” However, the Fraser Institute found the tax hike would punish many middle-class Canadians with modest incomes who’d invested in a second home or started a small business. 7. Dropping the digital service tax After pressure from big tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump, Carney acquiesced and axed the digital services tax a day before the first payment was due on July 1, 2025. The digital services tax was meant to recoup tax on digital transactions and earnings from large foreign tech companies that operate online marketplaces, advertising services, and social media platforms that sell access to user data. The parliamentary budget officer had forecasted the tax would have brought in $7.2 billion in revenue in the first five years alone. 8. Supporting a new pipeline Carney forged a new path than his predecessor late last year when he signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to explore a new bitumen pipeline to B.C.’s coast. Although the prime minister’s action countersignals the Trudeau government’s general stance against new pipelines, critics of the proposed pipeline point out that the MOU does not guarantee a new pipeline will be built, as private investors have to show major interest in the project. Furthermore, Indigenous co-ownership, carbon sequestration, environmental reviews, and coastal Indigenous groups’ approval are all required, likely making the project less attractive. 9. Encouraging Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) development Carney’s inaugural budget reintroduced a tax credit for LNG development in Canada, which the Trudeau government had allowed to expire in 2024. The current prime minister signalled that Canada is now positioning itself to supply the global markets with cleaner-burning natural gas as opposed to what much of the world is still burning: vast amounts of higher carbon-emitting coal. 10. Suspending clean electricity regulations that targeted Alberta Carney’s MOU with Smith not only had to do with pipelines, but also suspended the Trudeau government’s Clean Electricity Regulations (CER), which would have required a net-zero grid in all the provinces by 2050 (initially required by 2035). As Falice Chin, The Hub’s Alberta bureau chief, highlighted at the time, CER would’ve likely unfairly punished Alberta, increasing electricity costs without actually curbing carbon emissions. The Carney reversal on CER now allows investors in Alberta to pursue AI data centres that could perform well in the province’s colder climate alongside its vast amounts of energy. 11. Implementing carbon capture instead of hard caps Carney’s Canada Strong Budget 2025 revealed his government planned to significantly curtail the Trudeau government’s hard cap on emissions, opting for carbon capture sequestration to offset increased industrial carbon emissions. Carney called his predecessor’s policies “too much regulation, not enough action.” His budget signalled it could eventually be completely scrapped, describing the oil and gas emissions cap as only providing “marginal value in reducing emissions.” 12. Downsizing the public service Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne admitted late last year that the public service needed to be cut back to a more sustainable level, with the budget indicating a reduction of 40,000 positions. However, Carney’s plan cuts back the public service through early retirement plans and buyout packages over several years. Under Trudeau, the federal bureaucracy grew unabated for a decade, climbing from 257,034 employees in the federal public service in 2015 to a peak of over 367,000 employees by 2024, swelling by over 40 percent. 13. Eliminating the antisemitism and Islamophobia representatives  Carney dissolved both the Offices of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia and the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism at the start of February. Identity Minister Marc Miller told the press the Carney government would be creating a new national unity committee in lieu of specific roles for specific forms of discrimination and hate. 14. Reducing immigration targets Although the Trudeau government in late 2024 already put forth reduction targets for permanent resident admissions from 500,000 to 395,000 in 2025, and down to 365,000 by 2027, the Carney government added to these reductions, shrinking them a further roughly 5 percent, and strengthened them in the 2025 budget. The Carney government also set the goal of reducing permanent resident annual admissions to less than 1 percent of Canada’s overall population, while reducing the temporary resident population to less than 5 percent. Under Trudeau, from 2021 to mid-2024, Canada’s population grew by three million people, a few thousand more people than in the entire 1990s. 15. Slashing international student quotas In order to reduce the temporary resident population, currently near 7 percent of our total population, the Carney government has slashed the international study permit targets by 49 percent in 2026. The 2024 Liberal government had planned to issue 305,900 international student permits in both 2026 and 2027. The Carney government late last year reduced those numbers to 155,000 permits in 2026 and 150,000 for each of the following two years. International applications to attend post-secondary schools in Canada plummeted in 2025. Conclusion Despite course correcting on significant parts of Trudeau’s legacy, Carney is still preserving other aspects of his predecessor. The prime minister has kept the last government’s central federal social programs, including federal funding for child care, dental care, and the Canada Child Benefit, while also expanding tax breaks for low-income Canadians with the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, estimated to cost taxpayers $12.4 billion over five years. He also reintroduced EV rebate subsidies up to $5,000 to encourage Canadians to transition away from gas vehicles. Despite Prime Minister Carney ditching sizable parts of Prime Minister Trudeau’s legacy, many argue this does not make Carney a fiscal conservative, even if media narratives might tell us he’s a tight fiscal manager who has implemented a strict new dress code of suits and ties at Parliament Hill. Taken as a whole, Carney’s policy prerogatives have largely involved increasing deficit spending for existing and new government programs, reflecting the technocratic tendencies he outlined in his book, Values, which calls for big solutions at the hands of government.