It would be hard to overstate how much of the Carney government’s actions to this point have occurred exclusively in the bureaucratic realm. Committees have been convened, commissioners have been hired, plans have been announced, strategies have been published, and a flurry of agreements have been signed.
But with the Carney government now marking one year since its ministry was sworn in, very few of these procedural changes have yielded any measurable results. As an example, just in the last month Ottawa has announced a National Electricity Strategy, an agreement with Manitoba to get “major projects built faster,” and a renewed agreement with Alberta updating the terms of when it might approve a new oil pipeline. The Prime Minister’s Office also boasted that Prime Minister Mark Carney became the first-ever Canadian leader to attend the European Political Community Summit.
But in all four cases, there’s been no material change to Canadian law, policy, or the workings of its federal government. Every cited accomplishment exists only on paper. With that in mind, here is an attempt to sum up the actual, physical accomplishments of the Carney government in the last 12 months. These are the measurable things that are different because of an action taken by Carney or one of his ministers.
He’s Repealed Quite a Few Taxes
Repealing taxes is one of the easier things for a prime minister to do, if only because most federal taxes can be dropped with the stroke of a pen. The most obvious example was Carney’s scrapping of the consumer carbon tax. He also dropped rates on the federal income tax, cancelled a planned increase to the capital gains tax, and killed the Digital Service Tax. Just last month, the Carney government also followed the lead of governments across Europe by introducing a four-month holiday on federal fuel taxes.
He Scrapped the Oil and Gas Emissions Cap
Several figures in the oil and gas sector have criticized Carney for talking a big game about making Canada an “energy superpower,” all while leaving in place much of the environmental policy that has been most instrumental at scaring away investment. The most recent example of this was Cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie, who told a conference last month that Canada’s insistence on being the only country with an industrial carbon tax was making Canadian oil “uncompetitive with the rest of the world.” However, the Carney government is responsible for removing one particularly notorious piece of Canadian environmental policy. As part of its November agreement with Alberta to build a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, Carney scrapped plans to impose an “emissions cap” on the oil and gas sector.
