Since 2015, the federal government has kneecapped Canada’s economy with, in addition to higher taxes and profligate spending, its unending regulatory attacks on oil and gas. Its Bill C-69 in 2019 significantly expanded the regulatory burden for building pipelines and other major infrastructure, and its Bill C-48 in the same year effectively banned shipments of oil to and from ports on British Columbia’s northern coast. In 2023 it announced new fuel regulations to compound the costs of its carbon tax, imposed a hard cap on greenhouse gas emissions specifically targeting oil and gas, and laid out its plans — reaffirmed in 2024 — to ban sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035.

Despite changing leaders, the Liberal government today offers Canada no respite from its continued attacks on natural resources. While their former leader once said he admires China because “their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest,’” their new leader spent recent years trying to financially cripple Canada’s oil and gas sector and any other sector of the economy that relies on fossil fuels.

The one major policy gap between Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney is that the carbon tax they and all other federal Liberals steadfastly supported for years has had to be renounced now that Canadians have made clear they don’t want it. But Carney hasn’t actually renounced carbon taxes as policy. He continues to insist “a form of price on carbon” will be “a requirement” for Canada to diversify its international trade.

It is becoming something of a pattern for the new Liberal leader: cancelling the existing carbon tax while insisting Canada must have some kind of carbon tax, proposing to have a balanced budget three years from now that is not actually balanced, and — the latest – having his environment minister affirm the Liberals will keep the oil and gas emissions cap while simultaneously musing that he may consider alternatives. Of course, he was publicly musing about moving away from the emissions cap while in Alberta. The next day, back in Ottawa, Carney said the punitive emissions cap on oil and gas was back on — a little like Donald Trump announcing tariffs in the morning and withdrawing them in the afternoon.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith rightly denounced Carney’s flip-flop. The emissions cap will cost Albertans and Canadians tens of thousands of jobs, she said, a number confirmed earlier this month by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, whose report estimated the cap would cut GDP by $20.5 billion and reduce employment across Canada by 54,400 full-time equivalents by 2032.

In contrast to the Liberal leader’s confusing proposals, Smith has made nine clearly stated demands of her own to the federal government to make it “clear that Albertans will no longer tolerate the way we’ve been treated by the federal Liberals over the past 10 years.” Among them: repealing Bill C-69 and C-48, eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap, “which is a production cap,” reversing the incoming ban on gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles, ending the bans on single-use plastics, and returning oversight of the industrial carbon tax to provinces.

The emissions cap is indeed effectively a production cap, and Carney’s supposed intention to make Canada “an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy” rings hollow. As the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Heather Exner-Pirot has written, the emissions cap: “is not compatible with a single new pipeline or LNG (liquefied natural gas) facility. The problem is not the cap. Emissions in the sector peaked in 2015. The problem is the cut — a reduction of 35-38 per cent below 2019 levels. This cannot be done while maintaining growth and competitiveness of the sector. No one will invest in new projects in Canadian oil and gas.”

The federal Conservatives have joined the Alberta government in opposing these bad Liberal policies. With its abundant natural resources, they say, Canada should be the richest country in the world — not the slowest-growing economy (after adjusting for population) of just about any developed country over the past 10 years. They are right. Canada has already lost a decade of economic growth. Let’s not vote to kneecap the economy for another four years.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.

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