PM Carney’s Carbon Pricing Capitulation Hobbles Canada’s Climate Ambition

PM Carney’s Carbon Pricing Capitulation Hobbles Canada’s Climate Ambition

Statement by Cathy Orlando, National Director, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada
Sudbury | Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 14, 2026

Prime Minister Carney’s plan to delay industrial carbon pricing to $130/tonne until 2040 is a gift to polluters. With oil sands paying just dimes per barrel for carbon pricing, as the Canadian Climate Institute has shown, weak pricing sacrifices both climate progress and economic opportunity.

Industrial carbon pricing is meant to drive immediate emissions reductions from Canada’s largest polluters. Yet Prime Minister Carney’s Memorandum of Understanding with Alberta delays the price increase to 2040, turning this policy into a license to pollute. The justification? To unite the country. But unity cannot come at the expense of climate action, especially when an Alberta judge has already thrown out the separation referendum petition. Now, Canada pays the climate piper while Alberta’s industry reaps the profits. This isn’t unity. It’s capitulation to polluters.

Cancelling the consumer carbon price with rebates, scrapping the oil and gas pollution cap, and now hobbling industrial carbon pricing for the oil and gas industry can only make one question: What does PM Carney truly value?

The oil and gas sector, Canada’s largest source of emissions, cannot be addressed by delay. As Clean Energy Canada, Pembina Institute, and other experts argued in their joint letter, $130/tonne by 2030 is achievable, necessary, and the key to unlocking tens of billions in clean energy investment.

Meanwhile, industry profits are soaring—nearly $100 billion this year, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives—while Canadians face the consequences of climate inaction. Delaying this price until 2040 will add millions of tonnes of pollution, making our net-zero targets impossible to reach. As well, Canada is the only G7 country whose emissions have risen since 1990.

As the House Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development recently concluded: “The government has not treated emissions reduction with the seriousness it demands.”

Big Oil, with war-driven profits in 2026, chooses shareholder payouts over new projects. They balk at spending dimes per barrel for the climate crisis, but fork over billions for dividends to shareholders?  When profits trump the planet, we all lose.

And that is why in June, we will return to Ottawa for 28th time since 2010, to lobby our MPs for stronger climate policies.

Media Contact:
Cathy Orlando, National Director
Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada
cathy@citizensclimate.org | 705-929-4043

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