Former climate minister McKenna describes struggles over carbon pricing in new book

Catherine McKenna is shown in Ottawa, before the release of her new book "Run Like A Girl," on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

OTTAWA — Former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna says the Justin Trudeau government’s efforts to explain the consumer carbon price to Canadians were “half-hearted” — and just getting a meeting with the prime minister to discuss it “seemed impossible.”

McKenna offers those behind-the-scenes details in her new autobiography, Run Like A Girl, which is being launched next week.

McKenna, first elected in 2015, was immediately named the minister of environment and oversaw the implementation of carbon pricing in 2019. She describes in her book her struggles to defend and promote consumer carbon pricing, which was ultimately repealed by Prime Minister Mark Carney on his first day in office in March.

She says the idea of making the consumer carbon price “revenue-neutral” by rebating the money collected to Canadians first came from a meeting she had with George Shultz, a Republican who was secretary of state under former U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

“But pushing this idea internally wasn’t easy. Some people, particularly in the (Prime Minister’s Office), wanted to invest any new revenue in green projects,” McKenna writes.

“I argued that if we went down that path, people would see it as a tax grab and challenge how we spent the money.”

She says then-finance minister Bill Morneau supported a revenue-neutral program, but when they tried to pitch the idea to Trudeau, they struggled to get a meeting.

“This was a flagship government policy, yet getting half an hour to discuss it seemed impossible,” she writes.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, McKenna said her efforts to get a meeting with Trudeau shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on his commitment to climate action.

“I think it was more his leadership style. It was hard to get meetings with him. And we were always told, ‘You could always call up the prime minister,’ but for whatever reason, I could not get a meeting for a very long time on one of the most important policies,” she said.

“I really wanted to look him in the eye and just say, ‘You’re on board with this, right?’”

In the end, McKenna writes, it was Liberal MPs speaking up in a caucus meeting who helped her get Trudeau on side.

But it was Trudeau’s decision to exempt home heating oil from carbon pricing several years later that ultimately killed the policy, she adds.

That move, which happened two years after McKenna left federal politics, overwhelmingly benefited people in Atlantic Canada, while people in other parts of the country are more likely to heat their homes with other fuels, such as natural gas.

“I was stunned. This wasn’t just a policy shift — it was a blatant, politically motivated move designed to shore up support in Atlantic Canada. When I saw (Trudeau) standing behind a podium with a sign that read, ‘Making Life More Affordable,’ I spit out my coffee,” McKenna writes.

“The announcement was beyond cynical. It was stupid. It created confusion and resentment outside of Atlantic Canada. It also undermined the government’s climate goals and sent the message that action on climate change could be delayed whenever it became politically convenient.”

The government faced other obstacles to getting Canadians to support consumer carbon pricing, she writes, citing the reluctance of Canada’s big banks to properly label the Canada Carbon Rebate in people’s bank accounts and the Canada Revenue Agency’s initial refusal to issue quarterly payments rather than lump sums.

The policy was undermined further by a flawed analysis issued by the parliamentary budget officer which suggested Canadians were paying more than they were getting back in rebates, McKenna says.

In 2024, the PBO office admitted it made an inadvertent error in its initial analysis five years prior by including the carbon price charged to big industry. It ran the analysis again and came to a similar conclusion — but also acknowledged that the impact on household income would be lower than it predicted in its previous report.

The Liberals also criticized the PBO analysis for looking at the economic impact of carbon pricing without taking into account the cost of climate change itself.

In her book, McKenna calls the PBO’s error “flagrant malpractice.”

She also claims the Liberals limited their efforts to communicate to Canadians how carbon pricing actually affected their household income.

“It was partly our government’s fault,” McKenna writes, adding the Liberals introduced restrictions on government advertising after being elected.

Federal officials feared a public education campaign on carbon pricing would be viewed as too political, McKenna recalls.

“In retrospect, our restrictions backfired. I wasn’t sure how providing factual information about a carbon rebate that Canadians needed to apply for when they did their taxes qualified as political,” she writes.

“Instead, they were fed misleading statements or outright lies by Conservative politicians like Pierre Poilievre, who repeatedly called the carbon price a ‘job-killing tax’ that needed to be ‘axed.’”

Today, McKenna is the chair of the United Nations high-level expert group on net-zero emissions commitments from non-state entities. She has a new report coming out in a few weeks on how the Paris agreement was instrumental in getting government and industry to act on lowering emissions — and how the next decade will be critical to the fight against climate change.

Her report comes as the Carney government still refuses to say whether it’s committed to Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction targets.

Speaking to reporters in French on Thursday in Edmonton, Carney said he was focused on “results not goals” when asked if he’s still committed to Canada’s targets under the Paris agreement.

Asked for her thoughts on where the Carney government is heading on the Paris agreement — which she helped to negotiate and writes about extensively in her book — McKenna said she has faith in Carney.

“I’ve worked with Mark Carney when I was minister. He came to Canada, he supported our policies. We talked about the importance of carbon pricing,” McKenna said.

“He has not announced his climate plan. He says that that’s going to come.”

Nick Murray, The Canadian Press