The Liberal leadership race triggered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation January 6 could bring a new round of discussion to the party’s climate and energy transition policies, but that will hinge on how the rules governing the campaign are set and which candidates throw their hats in the ring.
Of the 10 potential candidates identified in news reports so far, at least three can claim credentials in some aspect of climate response or energy transition, while another three are seen to be more closely aligned with fossil fuel interests. Depending on which of those voices show up in the campaign, one veteran observer says a lukewarm Liberal response could open the door for the New Democratic Party to regain ground on climate change and energy.
In his statement Monday morning, Trudeau asked Governor General Mary Simon to prorogue Parliament until March 24, declaring that he isn’t the right choice to lead his party into this year’s federal election. The announcement followed months of drama, dissent and cratering public support, culminating in the resignation last month of Finance Minister and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, now considered a top leadership contender. In the wake of Freeland’s announcement, a growing wave of Liberal caucus members prevailed on Trudeau to stand aside.
“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it’s become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau told media.
Those words opened a leadership process that will begin with a six-hour national caucus meeting Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported, then a discussion by the Liberal Party’s national executive, The Globe and Mail said, in the story that broke the news.
Trudeau, who will stay on as PM and Liberal leader until his successor is chosen, made his announcement just two weeks before Donald Trump begins his second term in the White House. Trump greeted the news by doubling down on his mutterings about annexing Canada as a 51st U.S. state – a notion that has already prompted at least one call to defend Canadian sovereignty by standing up for community energy and energy democracy.
CBC has the most complete rundown so far of the potential candidates. They are (in alphabetical order):
• Transport Minister and former Treasury Board president Anita Anand
• Former Liberal MP Frank Baylis
• Mark Carney, a climate finance expert and former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who has never held elected office but is reportedly making the rounds to pitch his candidacy to the Liberal caucus
• Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who’s been at the forefront of efforts to promote Canada as a destination for clean energy investment
• Former British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, a relentless advocate for her province’s liquefied natural gas industry while she was in office
• Freeland, once referred to as Trudeau’s “Minister of Everything” and long touted as a future leadership candidate
• Government House Leader Karina Gould
• Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly
• Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who stepped in as interim finance minister when Freeland resigned and once saw fit to consult the federal ethics commissioner over his ties to New Brunswick’s powerful Irving Oil empire
• Natural Resources and Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, a former environment and climate minister who ran a cleantech firm before he entered politics
Fernando Melo, federal director of policy and government affairs at the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA), declined to comment on individual candidates’ track records or future prospects. But “anyone who has served in the Liberal government has shown a remarkable understanding of the role of renewable energy and energy storage in accelerating Canada’s economy, and in a moment of affordability, helping to reduce costs for all Canadians,” he says.
CanREA has “a really open door engaging with all the parties right now,” he adds. Whichever one forms the next government, “the big question will be how we ensure that Canada remains an attractive place to invest capital” while provinces carry through with the now 13,000 megawatts of clean electricity they’re in the process of procuring.
“It’s a competitive market for investment, and it’s not just Canada that needs new renewable electricity and storage. The globe does,” Melo says. “So whoever forms a government needs to think long and hard about how we continue those things.”
Tyler Meredith, a former policy director to Freeland and founding partner of Meredith Boessenkool & Phillips policy advisers, says that climate and energy issues would more likely come to the surface in a longer leadership campaign that ran 90 to 100 days, with time for policy debates on different topics across all the regions of the country. A shorter calendar – dictated by the prorogation date of March 24, and the likelihood that the government will fall to a non-confidence motion immediately afterwards – would “leave very little time to have a really rich policy debate.”
But all of the candidates will be looking for ways to differentiate themselves, Meredith says, from each other and from Trudeau – and for some of them, that will mean focusing on energy and environment.
In spite of the Conservative opposition holding a 25-point lead over the Liberals – and Trudeau carrying a -43 net favourability rating – in the aftermath of Freeland’s resignation, Meredith stresses that all the leadership candidates will be running for government, not opposition. “Don’t discount the possibility that this leadership race has the effect of potentially energizing things,” he says.
Climate Emergency Unit team lead Seth Klein says that the Liberal leadership race could also open up an opportunity for the NDP – particularly if the winning candidate is Clark, whose provincial climate-action plan was literally written (or, at least, rewritten) in the boardroom of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or Freeland, long seen as the biggest obstacle to more ambitious climate action in the Trudeau cabinet.
“If you are a climate voter, you’re much more likely to have seen the Liberal Party as the strongest on climate over the last few years, whereas the NDP ranks at the same level as the Conservatives,” Klein says, mainly because “you never heard about climate” from NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. But if the Liberals choose a leader who looks to be shifting its priorities in a different direction, “that would open up space for the NDP to pick up the banner.”
In a release Monday afternoon, Climate Action Network Canada said that Trudeau “accomplished more on climate policy than any other Canadian Prime Minister so far,” leading “a revolution in how we tackle climate change” that still fell short of what the country needed.
“The resulting policies have contributed to, and will continue, improving the lives of people and communities,” executive director Caroline Brouillette said. But “we have seen that no climate approach will be successful without dismantling the fossil fuel industry’s grip on Canada’s policy and politics.”
This article originally appeared in The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.
