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Carney Endorses Pipeline Expansion as Wildfires Rage Across Canada

He’s even considering overriding species protection laws to move quickly on big projects

When Ontario’s boreal forest erupted into flame halfway through July, Canadians were reminded of something they hadn’t experienced in a while: the material consequences of a changing climate. Scenes at once shocking and familiar seared our screens—titanic walls of flame photographed from a fleeing boat, video from the inside of a moving train encased in flame, Toronto glowing orange with the worst air quality on earth. Climate change was back on the public radar.

Prime Minister Mark Carney assesses geopolitical chaos as a greater threat to Canada than climate change

Carney views environmental protection as a political liability, and polls suggest he’s right

Carney’s promises around clean energy production fall short of the money and urgency invested in the oil patch

Almost instantly, however, it was displaced by another destructive force whose grip on our imagination has proven even stronger. “The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” US president Donald Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social. Accusing Prime Minister Mark Carney of “refusing to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal,” Trump threatened to retaliate with tariffs if Carney didn’t find a way to put the fires out. Flexing the full power of unintended irony—this is the man dismantling his country’s Environmental Protection Agency—Trump added: “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence.”

Indeed Mr. President, it is. The increased flammability of Canada’s northern forests is one of the purer signals of a heating planet. Unlike forests further south, where a century of fire suppression and monoculture plantation have also played a role, the northern boreal remained largely untouched. There’s only one factor causing it to burn more than before: a hotter, drier climate. And the primary force behind that is humanity’s combustion of fossil fuel.

Carney knows all this. But rather than say so, he was forced—conveniently, some might argue—to address the complaints Trump raised. Instead of talking about root causes, Carney thanked Canada’s firefighters, talked about the scale of their efforts, and reminded Trump that Canadians have been known to help Americans put out their forest fires too. These became our national media’s talking points. They are valid and important observations. But they fail entirely to acknowledge the reason why our wildfires are getting so big, so often. The only politician of any stature in Canada who went there was the federal New Democratic Party leader, Avi Lewis, who told CNN, “Apparently, we have to remind everyone of these facts: wildfires are getting more and more devastating because they’re being turbocharged by global warming. Global warming is being caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.”

The same day Lewis said that, Trump went ahead and imposed a fresh wave of tariffs on Canada (ostensibly for reasons that had nothing to do with wildfire) that took over the headlines. The fires were still burning, but the conversation moved on.

That entire sequence of events made me reflect on a dynamic I’ve been wrestling with since Carney was elected. Like so many in Canada’s environmental........

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