Long before becoming Prime Minister, Mark Carney warned that climate change wasn’t simply an environmental issue – it was a failure of long-term thinking. In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, he argued that governments, businesses, and individuals too often prioritize immediate economic and political gains over the well-being of future generations. It was a compelling vision of leadership rooted not just in economics, but in responsibility.
Which is why we find some of his government’s recent environmental decisions not only disappointing, but deeply alarming.
Take the proposed west coast oil pipeline. The government argues that expanding Canada’s energy infrastructure is necessary for economic resilience and national security, and that new technologies such as carbon capture can help offset emissions. Critics, however, contend that expanding fossil fuel infrastructure is fundamentally inconsistent with Canada’s long-term emissions commitments. We are told that expanding fossil fuel infrastructure today will somehow accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels tomorrow. Carbon capture, technological innovation, and future efficiencies are offered as assurances that we can continue down our current path without fundamentally altering its destination. Whether carbon capture can be deployed at sufficient scale and at a reasonable cost remains the subject of considerable debate among scientists and policy experts. And even if it proves successful, it does nothing to eliminate the well-documented risks that pipelines pose to the remote ecosystems and wildlife habitats they traverse.
Also extremely troubling is legislation that gives the federal cabinet (not even the house) the authority to approve the use of pesticides, that Health Canada has already determined are unsafe, when deemed necessary for economic or food security reasons. Safeguards exist for good reasons. These chemicals increase the risks of cancer, reproductive and neurological issues, not to mention cause environmental destruction. We can’t pollute our way out of our problems…thought we had learned this decades ago.
To be fair, governing is harder than writing a book. Every prime minister inherits competing priorities, regional tensions, economic pressures, and unexpected crises. Compromise is inevitable.
But our values matter most when they become inconvenient.
Anyone can defend environmental protection when the economy is strong and political costs are low. The real test comes when those commitments conflict with short-term interests.
That was, in many ways, the central message of Value(s).
The irony is that Carney now finds himself facing the very temptation he once described: sacrificing the long term for the immediate.
Perhaps every leader eventually confronts that tension.
But climate change doesn’t recognize political necessity. Ecosystems don’t respond to election cycles. The natural world simply reflects the cumulative consequences of our choices.
That is why environmental policy should never be built around exceptions.
Because once exceptions become the rule, the values we claimed to hold become little more than words.
