Environment minister disputes Guilbeault’s claim that Canada is cutting climate policies

Environment and Climate Change Minister Julie Dabrusin is pushing back against claims from Steven Guilbeault, who resigned from cabinet this week over Ottawa’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta and said Canada is dismantling several pieces of its climate plan.

“I really respectfully disagree with [Guilbeault] on his characterization of this memorandum of understanding,” Dabrusin said in an interview on CBC's Rosemary Barton Live. “I don’t see it as backsliding, and I don’t see it as cancelling programs."

The MOU — which paves a potential pathway for a new oil and gas pipeline to British Columbia long desired by Alberta — includes a commitment by Ottawa to not implement its oil and gas emissions cap and to suspend its clean electricity regulations in Alberta pending a new carbon pricing agreement.

Guilbeault — who was environment minister under former prime minister Justin Trudeau before being named Canadian identity and culture minister by Prime Minister Mark Carney — expressed concern about the fate of those policies in a statement announcing his resignation, adding that the measures “remain essential to our climate action plan."

Dabrusin said the MOU language around the clean electricity regulations is not a carveout. Instead, it allows her to negotiate with provinces, and they can demonstrate they’ll meet the objectives of the regulations in their own way.

When asked by host Rosemary Barton if she’s been given assurances Alberta will be able to meet the objectives, Dabrusin said the province will need to “meet the goal if we’re going to reach an agreement."

According to the MOU, Canada and Alberta have set a deadline of April 1, 2026, to come to a carbon-pricing equivalency agreement and a methane equivalency agreement.

The MOU includes a provision that Canada and Alberta “also agree to engage meaningfully with Indigenous Peoples in both Alberta and British Columbia on this project, with the involvement of the B.C. Government for engagement with B.C. First Nations."

Maureen Nyce, the elected chief councillor of the Haisla Nation in B.C’s North Coast, told Barton that she sees “a lot of barriers that will prevent this pipeline.”

“I think it’s going to be a very hard sell to British Columbia, to First Nations people,” Nyce said. She added that undoing the emissions cap and “basically undermining the Fisheries Act and the Species at Risk Act” will be met with a lot of resistance.

“If Canada gets this done, I will be gobsmacked if they can pull this off,” Nyce said. “And by the time they get this off the ground, I don’t think they’ll be able to sell any oil because nobody’s going to be buying it.”

B.C. Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix told Barton that “in our view, the pipeline continues to be as marginal a project as it ever was. What we’re concerned about, obviously, is the amount of time and attention that’s taken."

Dix said his province will continue to have conversations about the pipeline, “but there ain’t no project right now. So let’s focus on the real. And in B.C., that is building and leading the Canadian economic renaissance with real projects.”

The MOU makes it clear a key goal is the "one or more private sector constructed and financed pipelines” with Indigenous people's co-ownership and a route that increases export access to Asian markets.