Daily traffic on the 401 in Toronto. Photo from Flickr.

After six years of carbon pricing in Canada, the signature—and highly controversial—climate policy of the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals is on its last legs.

Provincial and federal Conservatives have opposed the measure since its inception, launching legal challenges against carbon pricing legislation in the Supreme Court and foregrounding an “Axe the Tax” message as a core plank of Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the looming federal election. The NDP has also backtracked from its support of the policy, with federal leader Jagmeet Singh calling for “an approach to fighting the climate crisis where it doesn’t put the burden on the backs of working people, where big polluters have to pay their fair share.” Premiers in British Columbia and Manitoba have also committed to quitting the scheme.

Now, as the Liberal leadership race comes to an end, many of the original boosters of the policy are preparing to abandon it. Seeming to draw on the left-populist framing floated by the NDP, Chrystia Freeland is reportedly “ready to make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions,” while Mark Carney said that “the vast majority of our emissions in Canada come from our industry.” He claims his focus will be on “getting those emissions down, more than changing in a very short period of time the way Canadians live.”

Even Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault expressed an openness to a reversal, stating that the carbon price is only one of “about 100 different measures we have deployed to fight climate change in Canada” and that focusing on industrial emitters is far more effective than on consumers.

Seemingly overnight, the Liberal-NDP consensus on carbon pricing has largely crumbled, leaving behind a hodge-podge of vague commitments about cracking down on large industrial polluters.

This development may seem like a welcome relief to the left, which has often criticized the carbon tax as a neoliberal measure that downloads moral and financial responsibility onto individuals and households who burn fossil fuels for transportation or heating. Unfortunately, it represents a new form of climate denialism that vastly understates the role of oil and gas across much of Canadian society and the tremendously difficult task of rapidly reducing emissions to limit catastrophic climate change.

Carbon pricing is far from an ideal policy, but the shift away from directly challenging any part of Canada’s emissions-intensive mode of living may be disastrous for achieving our already weak international climate commitments.

While large industrial emitters need to be targeted for significant emissions reductions—especially through cuts in total output, not merely per-unit emissions intensity—this will also require a radical overhaul in the way Canadians live. Exclusively focusing on the “big polluters” conveniently ignores this urgent task for crude political gain.

There are many aspects of dominant Canadian society that require significant downsizing to achieve rapid emissions reductions, including the frequent consumption of meat and dairy products, or the highly inefficient heating of single-family homes using natural gas. But when it comes to the continued centrality of oil, we have to reckon with the near-total dominance of private transportation of people and goods. While the resulting emissions are spread among tens of millions of individual vehicles, the transportation sector must also be collectively understood as a “big polluter” or “large emitter.”

There’s no question that oil and gas production is at the heart of Canada’s emissions crisis. In 2022, the most recent year that reporting is available, Canada emitted a grand total of 708 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). The oil and gas industry accounted for........

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