The federal government is under mounting pressure to come clean about something that might seem basic: does it actually know how its own policy changes will affect Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions?
That question took centre stage at a parliamentary committee hearing Thursday, where Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin found herself fielding wave after wave of pointed questions and struggling to offer satisfying answers.
Bloc Québécois MP Patrick Bonin was direct in his challenge. Speaking in French, he asked whether the government had any expert, or any set of figures, to show it was actually moving forward on climate change rather than retreating. “Do you have figures to show that?” he pressed.
Dabrusin pointed to the government’s methane regulations, published last December, as one concrete example of action. When Bonin pushed her on the broader picture the full scope of recent policy changes she referred to the national inventory report released in April. The problem, as observers were quick to note, is that the data in that report covers 2024 emissions figures that predate the Carney government and have nothing to say about what its decisions are doing to Canada’s climate trajectory.
Later in the hearing, Environment Canada Deputy Minister Mollie Johnson offered what amounted to a candid admission: the department has “some work to do” to actually crunch the numbers. She said officials are working to gather and analyze the cumulative effect of recent decisions, with the goal of eventually producing comprehensive modelling for the committee.
A senior government official, speaking on background because they lacked authorization to go on record, offered a partial explanation for the delay. The challenge, they said, is that many government announcements simply lack enough detail to feed into modelling systems. When the government unveiled its electricity strategy earlier this month and promised energy-saving retrofits for up to one million households, for instance, it offered no specifics making it impossible for Environment Canada to include that commitment in any meaningful calculation.
The pressure on Dabrusin comes against the backdrop of what climate advocates describe as a sustained dismantling of Canada’s environmental policy framework under Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Carney abolished the consumer carbon price on his first day in office. In the months since, his government has repealed the electric vehicle sales mandate, left the door open to scrapping the emissions cap on oil and gas producers, dismantled anti-greenwashing legislation, expanded fossil fuel subsidies, and made the federal industrial carbon price backstop more lenient for industry. All of these moves have been welcomed by business groups and energy sector stakeholders.
The numbers tell a difficult story. A government progress report published in December required by law under the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act showed Canada’s best-case emissions scenario landing at only a 28 per cent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030. That model assumed industrial carbon pricing would climb to $170 per tonne. But earlier this month, the Carney government struck a deal with Alberta setting the headline price at just $115 per tonne by 2030, a ceiling that will apply across all provinces and territories.
Canada’s commitment under the Paris Agreement is to cut emissions by 40 to 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Carney has said Canada remains committed to that goal. He has not explained how it can be achieved.
A February analysis by the Canadian Climate Institute concluded that Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate benchmarks not the 2026 interim target, not the 2030 Paris pledge, and not the longer-term goal of net-zero by 2050.
Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, was blunt in his assessment of Thursday’s hearing. He said there is no evidence, given the scale of changes made, that Canada has any pathway to meet its near- or long-term emissions targets and that Dabrusin was left trying to justify the unjustifiable.
“I think it’s a reasonable thing for the public to ask for evidence,” Gray added. “Obviously we’re open to that, but there’s been no evidence presented about why gutting all of this legislation would not have the negative impact we’re describing.”
Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said the whole point of the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act legislation her organization helped push into existence was to ensure ongoing, rigorous accounting that would inform policy in real time. That function, she argued, has broken down.
“The minister and the prime minister keep saying that we’re still committed to those targets, but meanwhile their actions and their policy decisions are doing the exact contrary,” Brouillette said. She also pointed to what she called an unusually centralized decision-making process, suggesting that key departments are sometimes left out of the loop when major announcements are made which only compounds the difficulty of producing credible, timely analysis.
The government’s departure from its previous climate posture has also prompted ruptures within its own ranks. Former Liberal environment minister Steven Guilbeault announced this week that he intends to resign as an MP, explicitly citing the government’s new direction on climate as his reason for leaving.
The Carney government has signalled it plans to introduce new climate measures, including a national electricity strategy though that strategy will involve deploying natural gas plants and the household retrofit program. Whether those commitments can close the gap between Canada’s current trajectory and its Paris targets remains, for now, an open and unanswered question.
