What If They Threw a Carbon Tax Election and Nobody Came? Plus: How Trump’s War on U.S. Media Affects Climate

Carbon pricing has fallen off the agenda, with no major party backing it in this year’s federal election. But can a global carbon tariff bring the diversified trade Canada needs in response to Trump?

Feb 09, 2025

As Donald Trump’s rise and Justin Trudeau’s fall upend public policy and priorities ahead of this year’s federal election, who knew that the sequel to Canada’s decade of carbon pricing paralysis might be an antidote to a world of tariff wars gone wild?

And that that antidote might create an opportunity to take two big, daunting problems, climate change and international trade relations, and help ease them both by tackling them together?

After a couple of years, not a few months, of enduring “Axe the Tax” rallies and rhetoric that were long on spin and an absolute wasteland for honest ideas or solutions, it’s almost been entertaining to see carbon pricing collapse as a political prop for the upcoming federal vote. The throwaway line—What if they threw a carbon tax election and nobody came?—might point to one of the healthiest political developments we’ve seen in many months. And it lands just in time, in a moment when Canada needs a serious, grown-up conversation about the multiple threats on our immediate horizon, not empty sloganeering.

With Trudeau exiting the scene and all three leading candidates for the Liberal leadership pledging to either cancel the consumer carbon tax or at least freeze it, Conservative strategists have been musing out loud that they might need a new message…and time is running short.

Production Note: These days we’re craving any news that isn’t primarily about Donald Trump, and we’re guessing that you might be, too. But please read to the end of this post.
Independent journalism is under sustained attack in Trump’s America, and some of the country’s top climate journalists have lost their jobs. If you value the reliable, evidence-based stories that help you make sense of a complex world and a mounting climate emergency, please follow this story. If you want to help, let us know.

One Minute to Midnight

The Liberal Party’s pivot has had the Conservatives in a bit of a last-minute scramble. “With Freeland and Carney now both abandoning the carbon tax, Poilievre has lost the one thing he had resembling a policy position. He’s left with an axe but nothing to wield it against,” writes Toronto Star contributing columnist Linda McQuaig.

"The carbon tax is no longer the ballot box question," a Conservative Party of Canada source in Western Canada told Radio-Canada last week. "But we've invested so much money fine-tuning that message, it's hard to abandon it completely."

At the time, CBC/Radio-Canada said there was no agreement among the Conservative brain trust about how much they dared shift their pitch to voters. So far, the national broadcaster writes, the party’s messaging has sought to tie Liberal frontrunners Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland to Trudeau’s legacy, not least because “a lot of money has been invested in this game plan, and there's little time left to change course.”

The breaking news from The Hill Times Friday was that Poilievre was planning a hastily-orchestrated rally later this month to reset his campaign theme from Axe the Tax to Canada First. We’ll see how that goes for him when latest polling by Nanos Research puts Carney ahead of the Conservative leader, by a margin of 40 to 26%, as the potential prime minister best equipped to negotiate with Trump.

The big dilemma for the Conservatives has been that "they don't want to reinvent the wheel at one minute to midnight, but I don't think they'll have a choice," a party strategist told CBC. "Canadians' minds are elsewhere."

And indeed, that’s the central problem Poilievre faces. “Trump’s gunslinger swagger about annexing Canada takes the focus here off the Liberal government’s carbon tax as the greatest danger that could befall Canadians,” McQuaig writes. “American troops massing at the border could pose more of a problem.”

The poll numbers on this new and emergent threat are borne out in the countless ways Canadians are responding to Trump’s tariff-mongering and 51st state threats. From Buy Canadian initiatives, to all the wonderfully goofy and understated expressions of Canadian pride, to the angry Axe the Tax adherents who are apparently now trading in their F*** Trudeau banners for the latest in flag-waving fashion—the ones that call out Trump instead.

The ever-reliable (though never evidence-based) Beaverton captured it best this morning with this lead headline: Furious Poilievre criticizes Trump tariffs for uniting Canadians.

Two Problems, One Solution

While the political scene recalibrates, there’s one idea floating around that any candidate of any political stripe should be proud to take up—because it just might take two big, daunting problems and slam them together into a single solution.

When Carney announced he was stepping back from the consumer carbon tax, he also pledged to “work with other like-minded countries to introduce a carbon border adjustment, effectively a tariff, that would ensure countries with weaker climate change policies face financial barriers when they try to export products to Canada,” CBC reported at the time. “In making the announcement, Carney took aim at U.S. President Donald Trump for his withdrawal from the climate policies of his predecessors, as well as his attacks on Canada, saying that while Trump steps back from the climate change fight, he will step up.”

“With Canada now under attack, it is time to come together,” Carney said during a policy announcement in Halifax. “And since Canada’s current climate policy has become too divisive, it’s time for a new, more effective climate plan that everyone can get behind.”

The non-profit World Resources Institute published an explainer on that more effective plan in December 2023, a couple of months after the European Union began the transition period for the world’s first Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). WRI described it as “one of the most extensive environmental trade policies so far,” a carbon price “that applies tariffs on imports such as steel and cement based on their carbon emissions.”

Astonishingly, in a world long ago, far away, and not quite 14 months back from where we stand today, WRI was able to recap four CBAM or CBAM-adjacent bills that were then before the U.S. Congress, two of them with bipartisan support, and one of them led by Senate Republicans Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and—take a deep, calming breath before you read this—Lindsey Graham (MAGA-SC).

We’ll see how Carney’s CBAM proposal plays out on the campaign trail, with Conservatives already trying to define him as a Trudeau-style carbon taxer. We may know soon enough whether a tariff applied internationally to climate laggards—and therefore a counter-tariff that catches Trump in its net—plays better with the folks at home than some of the alternatives that have emerged for new, improved domestic carbon taxes.

But meanwhile, with the EU already onboard and leading the way on carbon border adjustments, and Trudeau and Trade Minister Mary Ng working to shore up Canada’s alliances on the continent, you get to choose how to interpret carbon border adjustments, depending on whether your primary focus is inside or outside the climate “bubble”:

• Is it an effective climate policy that helps fast-track the now urgent need to diversify Canada’s economy and build true independence from the U.S.?

• Is it a visionary trade and economic diversification strategy that carries the absolutely essential “co-benefit” of driving down climate pollution?

• Or is it a bit or a lot of both?

Be Careful Who You Listen To

After retail carbon pricing crashed and burned as one of the Trudeau government’s signature policies, its defenders argued that the plan was undercut by a two-part messaging failure. They say the government did a terrible job of explaining something so basic as the financial gain most households would take away from the quarterly rebates they received, and that unforced error was compounded by Poilievre’s factually challenged Axe the Tax campaign.

Detractors like the Means & Ways newsletter, published on behalf of the blue-ribbon Coalition for a Better Future, say that argument demonstrates a continuing “blind spot” on climate policy, asserting affordability and fairness issues that would also afflict a Canadian CBAM. That line of argument, in turn, bakes in a different kind of blind spot about the climate change impacts Canadians are already living with every day, and the economic benefits the clean energy economy will bring to any household, community, province, or territory where progress isn’t being deliberately, systematically obstructed as a matter of policy.

But there was a deeper problem that may have doomed the retail carbon tax, even with the smartest comms strategy. It traced back to a notion that only an economist could love: that the best way to successfully confront the biggest crisis facing the country was to introduce a new tax, 35 to 40 years into an era when hatred for taxes of all kinds had become a dominant ideology, as taken for granted as the air we breathe.

No doubt, retail carbon pricing worked out just fine in theoretical models, including the one that eventually won a shared Nobel Prize for its creator (who in turn went on to propose import tariffs as a backstop for national climate action). But by the time Team Trudeau introduced its floor price on carbon, the trajectory should already have been clear: in Australia, it eventually took three elections and that many years of potential emission reductions wasted to oust a rabidly pro-coal, climate-denying national government, brought to power largely by its predecessor’s embrace of a carbon tax.

So what could possibly have gone wrong during the decade when carbon pricing took up so much of the oxygen in the room in Canadian climate policy?

But now, with Trump’s trade wars and serious threats of annexation supplanting all else as a vote-determining issue for Canadians, is a carbon border adjustment in partnership with EU members and other like-minded nations and regions the route to the economic diversification we now realize we need?

Climate Journalism Under Attack

And while we’re here...

If you’ve been able to stomach the news from Trump’s first three weeks in office, even in small doses, you know that he and wannabe co-president Elon Musk haven’t just set out to shift U.S. policy. They’re perpetrating economic terrorism, shuttering entire government programs and independent agencies, shredding the rule of law and the most basic human rights, trashing communities and working relationships around the world, and ignoring federal court orders that run counter to their plans. We’ve seen a couple of dozen hot takes arguing that the disruption is the whole point of the exercise—that this is a coup d’état in progress by oligarchs intent on seizing as much power as everyone else will cede.

Even in the best of times, journalism—real journalism, not rabid conspiracy theories dressed up as supposed investigative reporting—is a bulwark of democracy. And as long as energy and climate change are at the top of the agenda, climate journalism will be an essential part of that bulwark.

So you would expect Trump and Musk to go after journalism—and you would hope that one of America’s longest-standing sources of mainstream news to troll them back—just as they have.

Energy Mix Productions is a proud and often active member of the Covering Climate Now global news collaborative. We close today’s Weekender with this excerpt from their recent account of Trump’s blitzkrieg and its impact.

It’s a tumultuous time for climate journalists, and not only because the current president and an unelected billionaire are running roughshod over U.S. law, attacking NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency, and installing climate deniers across the federal bureaucracy. Even as the Los Angeles fires and a rapidly melting Arctic all but scream that climate breakdown is worsening, some of the most accomplished journalists on the climate beat have had their jobs threatened or eliminated. “We need the press to be at its best now,” media analyst Margaret Sullivan wrote on Substack. But it’s hard to do our best when newsroom staffs are shrinking and owners are kowtowing to the White House.
A massive round of layoffs at CNN ousted Rachel Ramirez, a reporter whose coverage has demonstrated the expansiveness of the climate beat and who won a Covering Climate Now Journalist of the Year Award in 2024. Cost-cutting at CBS News claimed the jobs of Ben Tracy, formerly the senior national climate and environment correspondent, and his colleague, producer, Chris Spinder—finalists in the 2023 CCNow Awards. Allen Media announced it was firing meteorologists at nearly two dozen local TV stations it owns; instead, local weather reports would be supplied from distant Atlanta. Outcry from viewers at WTVA in Mississippi and elsewhere led Allen to rescind that order—for now.
A decline in local news correlates with a decrease in public health and an increase in government corruption, studies have shown, because there are fewer avenues to provide health warnings and fewer watchdogs on spending. Having fewer journalists on the climate beat would invite similar outcomes. Nor should Trump’s bluster intimidate news outlets into thinking that telling the climate story is somehow politically biased. Our job is to report facts, and human-caused climate change is a scientifically established fact.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.