Whether he intended to or not, Prime Minister Mark Carney cast aside a tenet of the Liberals’ brand last Thursday when he signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Alberta that jeopardizes the Grits’ work addressing climate change.
For more than two decades, the Liberal Party of Canada told voters that it was the party that not only cared about climate change but was best able to address it. Election after election, from Jean Chrétien’s climate pivot in 2002 with the ratifying of the Kyoto accord, to Stéphane Dion’s “Green Shift,” to Justin Trudeau’s pan-Canadian framework on “Clean Growth and Climate Change,” to Carney’s platform, which mentioned the threat of climate change 27 times, the Liberal party told Canadians that the future of the planet depended on strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it pledged to do that while strengthening the economy through clean energy investments.
