Prime minister Mark Carney released another of his “Forward Guidance” videos yesterday, and it was…revealing. The historical figure that Carney used as his hook was the founder of Ontario Hydro, and it was all about the energy crises that we find ourselves living through. The problem? That so much of what Carney used as his frames of reference were based on 1) old myths that were not true; 2) revisionist history of the Trudeau government; and 3) wishful thinking. To break it down, Carney gave a line about how when he grew up in Edmonton, the National Energy Project made Albertans feel like “our resources weren’t our own,” which goes to the falsehoods around the NEP, and the generations of grievance politics that emerged from it. The NEP was never the problem—the collapse in global oil prices were. Alberta blamed the NEP, but to this day wishes they had the benefits, like west-east pipelines and a country-wide energy market instead of going north-south. Imagine that. Carney also says that more recently, “we were made to feel that our energy contributions were running against the tides of history.” Really? Trudeau, who bent over backwards for Alberta, built them a pipeline at the cost of his own political capital, and who kept giving money to the industry (who then squandered it)? And under whose leadership production rose to its highest levels ever, which Carney also admitted? Yeah, he was really making them feel bad about their energy contributions—except of course that they blamed him for the oil crash of 2014, that happened before he was in office. Huh. Carney didn’t mention that. Oh, and when Carney talks about how Alberta developed the oil sands, he omits that said development came with federal money and favourable tax treatment (thanks to Jean Chrétien). When your federalist leader keeps conceding the points of the separatists (which are falsehoods), it’s hard to see how he’s defending the country as a whole.
I have zero confidence that Carney will insist on the conditions of having a private sector proponent, or that Pathways happens (and I can pretty much guarantee that he'll shrug and say "Well, it was only going to capture 12 percent of emissions anyway").
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-30T15:11:12.884Z
From there, Carney kept going on about building our energy sector, and made some nonsense points about home-grown electrification, which…is already home-grown. We’re not importing electricity in any significant way. We export more. He talks about needing this new pipeline to have “new options,” but once the Strait of Hormuz opens up (which it will eventually), it’ll just be feeding a supply glut, which is going to further depress prices. And then he goes on about building trust internationally, before admitting that we’re not going to meet our climate targets (so, betraying the trust that we were building by saying we were going to meet our targets?) He kept insisting that the commitment to fighting the climate crisis is “absolute,” but he wants to do that by doubling down on oil and gas while also increasing electrification (omitting that said electrification will also mean more natural gas, particularly in Alberta). He also claimed that Trudeau’s climate plan, while it would meet our targets, was “unsustainable” and “too expensive.” Erm, you know how much more expensive climate change is, right? We’re talking orders of magnitude here. Oh, and it was “too divisive,” but only if you’re listening to liars and grifters, which apparently Carney is.
If I were Julie Dabrusin, I’d be pissed. Carney had sent her around to every media outlet to insist that they were “committed” to meeting those climate targets, and essentially demanding that she lie about it, only to pull a bait and switch and say that yeah, you guys were right, we’re not going to meet our targets after all, after spending months insisting that everyone else was wrong. So why should we believe anything this government says? Serious question.
Oh, and if you were playing the “Building Canada Strong™” drinking game, you’d be puking right now.