The Canadian Climate Politics Almanac: 2025 National Elections

Today, the United States Climate Politics Almanac is moving north!

It is Election Day in Canada. If a party can secure a 172-seat majority in Canada’s House of Commons, that party’s leader will be elected prime minister. The major contenders to achieve that are incumbent Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative (Tory) leader Pierre Poilievre.

Minor parties, such as Bloc Québécois led by Yves-Francois Blanchet and the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Jagmeet Singh, will try to pick up seats, though they are not projected to make gains. If no party wins 172 seats, the party that secures a plurality will attempt to form a minority government with the smaller parties.

“The [Liberals] only deliver when New Democrats have had the power to make them deliver,” Singh has asserted. Pushing Canada’s government toward stronger climate leadership is the goal of NDP candidates like Avi Lewis, the director of numerous films about the climate crisis, including This Changes Everything, based on a book by his wife Naomi Klein. Lewis is running in Vancouver Centre. There are more closely contested seats in Lewis’ home province of British Columbia than in any other province, although a gravitation of voters toward the larger parties has hurt the NDP even in the region where the party has generally had its strongest base.

At the beginning of this year, it looked likely that these elections would result in a clear victory for Poilievre and the Conservative Party. The Tories have been out of power since 2015, when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was replaced by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau moderated Harper’s obstructionist and fossil friendly approach to climate policy. In 2017, climate leader Bill McKibben recommended that the left “stop swooning” over Trudeau, since he had essentially maintained Harper’s support for extraction of Alberta’s tar sands. On balance, however, Canadian climate organizations have praised Trudeau for his accomplishments, which include establishing stronger climate targets; adopting the National Strategy for Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Act; and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies. Trudeau also issued a mandate to achieve 100% EV sales by 2035, which the Tories have said they’ll repeal. For most of his early tenure, Trudeau was very popular, but his approval ratings declined over time due to inflation, ethics scandals, and personal issues.

In January, a series of events upended these elections.

First, Trudeau resigned as party leader. Then, a wave of Canadian patriotism was seen after Donald Trump became president and kicked off a costly trade war, complete with bellicose rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state. These events caused a collapse in the 25-point polling lead that the Tories enjoyed at the beginning of 2025. Trump has completely dominated Canada’s election, and there has not been much substantive discussion of climate policy.

Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney: A Prominent Voice in Climate Finance

In March, Liberal party voters elected Mark Carney as their leader, elevating him to prime minister. Soon after, he called elections. Carney’s background is in the highest echelons of finance, including stints at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the asset manager Brookfield. From 2008 to 2020, Carney was one of the world’s top central bankers, serving first as governor of the Bank of Canada and then as governor of the Bank of England (BOE).

As head of the BOE in 2015, Carney delivered a landmark speech titled “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon—climate change and financial stability.” The speech stressed that “the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. “

In a reference to economist Hyman Minsky—who wrote about asset bubbles and financial crises— Carney warned about a “climate Minsky moment,” wherein a “wholesale reassessment of prospects, especially if it were to occur suddenly, could potentially destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and a persistent tightening of financial conditions.”

In other words, if the carbon bubble pops, the global economy could collapse.

Also as governor of the BOE, Carney was instrumental in forming the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a consortium of central banks and regulators dedicated to sharing best practices for climate risk management.

In 2019, Carney was named the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, in preparation for the 2020 COP in Glasgow. Later, Carney founded the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). Announced in advance of the 2021 COP, GFANZ nominally consists of the world’s largest financial institutions “committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy.” Subsequent analyses found major flaws with the GFANZ pledges. GFANZ members were slow to align their financing with their commitments, even before the mass exodus from GFANZ that occurred earlier this year.²

In a campaign that has largely hinged on American economic developments, Carney has leaned on his central banking experience. "I have seen this movie before. I know exactly what's going to happen to them, the Americans are going to get weaker," Carney told a campaign rally in Ontario, referring to his tenure as the BOE’s governor in the aftermath of the UK Brexit vote.

The fossil-fueled right has attacked Carney for his leadership in climate finance, with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith saying Carney has been “on a warpath against the energy industry for his entire career.” Carney seems sensitive to these attacks. Shortly after becoming PM, Carney ditched a carbon tax that Trudeau had put in place.³

Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre: An Aspiring Trumpist

The Tories are led by Pierre Poilievre, a former minister in Harper’s government. Poilievre has cut a very Trump-like profile, campaigning on a “Canada First” slogan. More recently, he has sought to clarify that he is "not MAGA." But Poilievre and his fellow Tories have strong ties to both Trump and corporate interests. Earlier in April, figures from the Canadian right gathered at a conference in Ottawa called Canada Strong and Free. Canada Strong and Free was led until recently by Tory minister Jamil Jivani, reportedly a close ally of both Poilievre and of US Vice President JD Vance.

At Canada Strong and Free, figures from fossil fuel companies, tech giants, and other corporations discussed plans to emulate Trump if the Tories take power and Poilievre becomes prime minister. Harper’s former chief of staff told TC energy executive Dave Forestell that the “good thing compared to the United States is that for all sorts of constitutional legal reasons, the impediments to DOGE moving quickly, we don’t really have to worry about in Canada.” Forestell praised Javier Milei, Argentina’s far-right climate denier president, for being “very successful at…taking the chain saw and eliminating things altogether.”

But as the campaign has entered its closing stretch, Liberals’ momentum has been quite strong. Now, there is speculation that Poilievre is even concerned about losing the rural Ottawa district that he has represented in the House of Commons since 2004.

‘Stranded Assets’ and the North American ‘Energy Transition’

During his 2015 “Tragedy of the Horizon” speech, Carney warned about financial stability problems from keeping fossil fuels in the ground. His speech emphasized that carbon budget necessary to keep global warming contained to international targets “would render the vast majority of reserves ‘stranded’ – oil, gas and coal that will be literally unburnable without expensive carbon capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics.”

Ten years later, the degree to which fossil fuel assets become stranded is an important question underlying geopolitics. Stranded assets came up during a recent discussion about the global shift to renewable energy on The Dig podcast. Net-Zero Industrial Policy Lab Co-Director Tim Sahay described how the US has become the world’s largest oil and gas exporter over the last decade, and noted that US-based fossil fuel barons have consolidated their power within the American Republican Party during the same time period. Sahay went on to say that these fossil fuel barons are determined to ensure that their “wealth does not get stranded ever, and so they’re in an existential fight with the green economy, and they’re determined to crush it.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration negotiated the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), which updated NAFTA. Though the USMCA was a modest improvement over NAFTA on several economic and labor issues, it was a major failure for the climate. Despite calls for binding climate targets to be included in the USMCA, the agreement failed to mention climate change at all. Instead, it preserved the rights of polluters to challenge environmental protections in corporate tribunals and contained language empowering oil companies to sue if the Keystone XL pipeline was not completed.

Next year, the USMCA will be renegotiated.⁴ This time around, Trump will still be president, but Canada and Mexico will have new leadership. It now appears likely that Trump’s counterparties in those negotiations will be two outspoken climate leaders: Prime Minister Carney, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who was a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change before entering politics. In discussing Sheinbaum’s leadership of Mexico, Sahay expressed hope that Sheinbaum could “pull off a Green New Deal in the Americas.” Hailing her success transforming Mexico City into a model for urban greening, Sahay highlighted many areas of stark contrast between Sheinbaum and Trump.

Sahay also said the course of Canadian and Mexican politics over the next several years will determine whether the US stands out as the only North American nation looking to disrupt the green transition. Evoking the historic lament of Mexico being “so far from God and so close to the United States,” Sahay explained that Sheinbaum and her government have tried to insulate Mexico from American influence by expanding trade talks with European nations. For his part, Carney has not only rebuked Trump’s rhetoric and encouraged Canadian patriotism. He has also vowed to offset the negative impacts of Trump’s tariffs by getting rid of Canada’s unusual barriers to inter-province trade and investing in infrastructure projects such as high speed rail.

The financial market impact of Trump’s economic sabotage to date has triggered a discussion over whether the Trump regime is deliberately ceding America’s global position as the preeminent financial power. As Trump’s inner circle of fossil fuel autocrats try to preserve their assets by crushing the green economy, they seem to be stranding Americans from the economic benefits of a transition that is happening with or without US involvement.

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