With Guilbeault gone, the Justin Trudeau era is now officially over |
Steven Guilbeault finally had enough. The renewed deal between Alberta and Ottawa, which lowers the headline industrial carbon price and weakens or eliminates other climate policies he fought for as the minister of environment and climate change, made it abundantly clear that he could no longer sit in the Liberal caucus. Indeed, the writing was so obviously on the political wall for him that you could have spotted it from across the Ottawa River in Gatineau.
But it’s worth reflecting on what that writing actually says — and what we ought to learn from it. Yes, Guilbeault’s resignation marks the end of the Justin Trudeau era, defined by lofty promises and plans on climate change and a conspicuous failure to protect and defend them from the inevitable attacks from the right. It also represents the end — or should, anyway — of a broader approach towards climate policy that prioritized ambition and long-term objectives over results and resilience.
I think climate policy advocates — and yes, I still include myself in that description — got a bit high on our own supply in the early years of this decade when climate shot up near the top of the public’s list of political priorities. In that post-COVID (and post-Trump) period, where economic scarcity was far less pressing and inflation had yet to really start biting, we had the luxury of focusing more on issues like climate policy. Then that boomeranged back on us, as the surge of global inflation caused by broken supply chains and other COVID-related hangovers like excessive economic stimulus was cynically blamed on climate policies, most notably the carbon tax. By the time Mark Carney officially killed the consumer carbon tax, it had already........