An op-ed, short for “opposite the editorial page”, is a written prose piece, which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.
Liberal Party of Canada leadership candidate Mark Carney delivers a speech as he’s introduced during the Liberal leadership announcement in Ottawa on Sunday, March 9, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Mark Carney was selected to be Canada’s next Prime Minister with a stunning 85.9% of the Liberal Party leadership vote. While he may have received a strong mandate from registered Liberals after a lacklustre, uninspiring leadership race, only 151,899 Canadians voted for him, ultimately making him Prime Minister. That’s 0.3% of Canada’s population. I decided to be one of those people and registered to be part of the process.
Being curious, I attended Carney’s March 4 rally in Calgary. We stood outside in the cold for an hour, passing through four checkpoints before accessing the venue where we then stood for another hour waiting for him to speak, nearly two hours after the scheduled start time. He spoke for about ten minutes, didn’t take questions, then left for a high-value fundraising event, as all politicians do; running a campaign requires a lot of money.
At the free rally, he spoke about growing up in Alberta, learning that humility and hard work are the way to a successful future. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been much of an Albertan over the years, what with his three passports – Canadian, Irish, and British – and many international roles.
He’s worked on his public persona and speaking skills, revealing a smoother, slightly more charismatic individual, one who could at times talk off script and tell jokes. He mentioned Pierre Poilievre twice but spent the majority of time talking about President Trump and the tariffs; this is a winning strategy for the Liberals.
His speech had an economic focus, which is to be expected as he is a technocratic banker and is using that experience as his main selling feature. He wants to build “strong economies” because “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have.” There is no problem that the government, his government, cannot solve.
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He opened with a promise to eliminate the consumer carbon tax, a deeply unpopular tax because people can see what they are paying. He didn’t say what he would replace it with, but he has said in interviews that it’ll be a shadow tax, one we can’t see.
His policy platform – It’s time to build – is heavy on platitudes like making “government more efficient and effective to deliver better results,” but it’s sparse on the details about how to make it happen. Even his marquee platform, his climate plan, is light on details and builds off what the Liberals have already been doing. Not much of a surprise since Carney has been advising Trudeau since 2020, but it’s not the change voters want.
Carney’s climate plan proposes the establishment of a “consumer carbon credit market.” For years, businesses have utilized carbon credits to offset their emissions, similar to how consumers purchase offsets for activities like flying – Southwest Airlines, among others, has implemented such programs.
The foundation of carbon credits and offsets is accounting: continuous measurement of emissions. As I understand Carney’s proposed plan, to mitigate their emissions, companies can purchase offsets from consumers who can sell them, provided they have not exceeded their carbon emissions allowance. This system balances carbon management. Consumers who have not exceeded their carbon budget can sell their surplus credits to companies who have emitted more than allotted.
The specifics of how the consumer emissions allowance will be structured remains unknown. One way could involve issuing a fixed number of credits, a carbon budget, to individuals annually, allowing the sale of excess credits to companies.
It may involve something similar to existing cap-and-trade systems, where regulators set limits on emissions that decrease over time, requiring the purchase of more and more offsets for various activities, generally at an increasing price. Additionally, it is yet to be determined if this would operate as a voluntary consumer market or a mandated, regulated compliance system. Regardless, a government department will likely have to be established to oversee the monitoring, verification, pricing, and issuance of credits in accordance with the regime.
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If you would like to read more about carbon markets, resources can be found here, here, and here.
Carney has been promoting the concept of “net zero” for years and launched The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) in 2021 at COP26. Unsurprisingly, his climate plan for Canada pledges to phase out the use of hydrocarbons in federal buildings by 2030, in five years. He doesn’t say what he would replace those necessary fuels with.
He has set a deadline of Fall 2026 to finalize the list of approved sustainable investments, which was started by the Liberals in Fall 2024. They refer to it as a “taxonomy,” but that’s a fancy word for a classification system indicating which industries are deemed acceptable or unacceptable for loans and insurance support.
Financial institutions and governments will know if a company is suitable because of self-disclose, and a bureaucrat or a banker on Bay Street will decide if the company’s operations fit within the taxonomy to “help align capital.” Under Carney, ESG reporting is not going away, regardless of what the Americans do.
Carney has been dominant in the climate movement. He has influenced financing and climate reporting in an effort to re-imagine how business is conducted, while forcing divestment of capital away from hydrocarbon development, the dominant energy of modern life. He has been rewarded with prestigious positions in return for his unwavering adherence to the movement. He was appointed the United Nation’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance in December 2019, a role that required, “special attention to significantly shifting public and private finance markets and mobilizing private finance to the levels needed to achieve the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement.” As long as he remains Prime Minister, expect further disruption to the Canadian resource sector.
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In an uncommon, but not unprecedented, circumstance, Canada will have a Prime Minister who does not have a seat in Parliament because Carney has never been elected, not even once. Nonetheless, he’s been receiving security briefings as if he has been, while simultaneously being treated like a private citizen by not being required to disclose certain private information to determine if he has conflicts of interest. To avoid scrutiny, rather than divesting of them, he moved all of his financial assets into a blind trust, which he is allowed to do under The Conflict of Interest Act.
While this is permissible, the problem is that Carney knows what assets and investments he holds, but Canadians don’t. That means he can make decisions while being the Prime Minister that benefit his assets while not necessarily being in the best interests of Canada, without anyone being the wiser. To be transparent, Carney could have disclosed his assets and investments to Canadians to avoid the perception of conflicts of interest. He chose not to.
Deidra Garyk is the Founder and President of Equipois:ability Advisory, a consulting firm specializing in sustainability solutions. Over 20 years in the Canadian energy sector, Deidra held key roles, where she focused on a broad range of initiatives, from sustainability reporting to fostering collaboration among industry stakeholders through her work in joint venture contracts.
Outside of her professional commitments, Deidra is an energy advocate and a recognized thought leader. She is passionate about promoting balanced, fact-based discussions on energy policy, and sustainability. Through her research, writing, and public speaking, Deidra seeks to advance a more informed and pragmatic dialogue on the future of energy.
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