The melting Arctic icecap. Record-smashing wildfires across several provinces. A country that, on average, is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.
And yet, as Canadians go to the polls Monday, climate change isn’t even among the top 10 issues for voters, according to recent polling.
“That’s just not what this election is about,” said Jessica Green, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who focuses on climate issues.
What the election is about, nearly everyone agrees, is choosing a leader who can stand up to Donald J. Trump. The American president has been threatening Canada with a trade war, if not total annexation as the “51st state.”
Leading in the polls is the Liberals’ Mark Carney, who has a decades-long pedigree in climate policy. For five years, he was United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and he spearheaded a coalition of banks that promised to stop adding carbon dioxide to the environment through their lending and investments by 2050.
Despite that résumé, Mr. Carney has not made climate central to his campaign. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down, one of Mr. Carney’s first moves was to scrap one of his predecessor’s least popular policies, a tax on fuel that included gasoline at the pump and was based on emissions intensity.
Even though most Canadians got much of that money back in rebate checks, Mr. Carney called the policy poorly understood and thus “too divisive.”
That move, coupled with what many see as similarities between his Conservative Party opponent, Pierre Poilievre, and Mr. Trump, have helped Mr. Carney as he’s risen in the polls.
“Carney did a really smart thing by repealing the consumer carbon tax, which was wildly unpopular and was basically the basis of Poilievre’s campaign against him,” Dr. Green said. “That took the wind out of the Conservatives’ sails.”
Mr. Carney is keenly aware of the dynamic. In a recent televised debate, he pointedly told Mr. Poilievre that he had “spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax, and they are both gone.”
Mr. Poilievre is a champion of Canada’s enormous oil and gas industry. The country is the world’s fourth largest oil producer and fifth largest for gas. But unlike Mr. Trump, he does acknowledge the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are driving global warming.
“Canadian oil and clean natural gas should be displacing coal and reducing emissions worldwide by allowing India and other Asian countries to use our gas instead of dirty coal,” he said at a news conference on the campaign trail earlier this month.
But Mr. Carney’s proposals are not all that different. He says that he wants to make Canada into “a superpower in both conventional and clean energy.” His platform proposes measures such as bolstering carbon markets and speeding up approvals of clean energy projects.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two candidates is their stance on Canada’s oil and gas emissions cap, and a tax on industrial emissions. Both policies were championed by Mr. Trudeau.
Mr. Poilievre would scrap them, in line with industry demands, while Mr. Carney would keep them. According to the Canadian Climate Institute, the industrial carbon tax reduces emissions at least three times as much as the consumer tax did and would do more than any other policy in place to cut emissions between now and 2030.
Canada is one of the world’s highest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita and is off-track to meet its pledges to reduce its emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement. It has targeted cuts of at least 40 to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, but the latest national emissions inventory report shows a drop of just 8.5 percent through 2023.
Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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