Liberal prime ministers aren’t supposed to get standing ovations in Calgary, much less from a room packed full of mostly-Conservative business leaders and provincial cabinet ministers who spent the better part of a decade honing their hatred of the Trudeau government. But Mark Carney, for better or worse — more on that in a moment — is clearly not your average Liberal prime minister. After all, he got two standing ovations. 

To some outside of Calgary, it might have looked like an undignified surrender to Danielle Smith and her government’s relentless campaign for more oil and gas production. That’s certainly how the Toronto Star, among others, framed the announcement with a headline suggesting that “Carney drops Trudeau-era climate measures in deal with Alberta.” I’d argue the prime minister did something much different: he saved the most important Trudeau-era climate measure of all. 

As the Canadian Climate Institute noted in a 2024 report, industrial carbon pricing was expected to deliver the bulk of Canada’s emissions reductions through 2030 and beyond. But it was being undermined by Alberta’s deliberate and repeated attempts to dilute the effective carbon price in its province, and the broader credit market over which the province exerts a significant influence as a result of the sheer size of its industrial emissions. Under the terms of the MOU, Alberta will ramp its industrial carbon pricing system........

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