Climate Policy Under Justin Trudeau: A Brief Review

Written by: Liad Wolch

Edited by: Sonja Colford

Climate change has been a defining policy issue in Justin Trudeau’s decade-long tenure as prime minister. From signing the Paris Agreement in 2015 to implementing the now infamous carbon tax, Trudeau has made significant transformations to the Canadian climate policy landscape in a time when action on the issue has become both increasingly pressing and contentious. With his recent resignation as prime minister and Liberal Party head in January 2025, this moment presents a useful opportunity to highlight some of Trudeau’s most important climate policies, and assess their impact on Canada’s political and economic landscapes.

Net-Zero by 2050

Perhaps most important to Trudeau’s climate legacy is the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act (Bill C-12). Implemented in 2021, the act legislated Canada’s commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, and mandated five-year emissions reductions plans beginning in 2035. While the act does not detail how these goals will be realized, it does serve as an important measure of accountability for the federal government. The target also brings Canada in line with the rest of the G7, a group of the West’s seven largest economies, as international efforts to address emissions have expanded following the Paris Agreement.

Despite committing to a net-zero plan, however, the federal government has failed to meet its own emissions reductions targets: in 2024, Federal Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco assessed that Canada has only reduced emissions by 7.1% since 2005, far from the government’s 40-45% by 2030 target (Thurton, 2024). The audit highlighted the delayed oil and gas pollution cap as a major inhibitor to meeting the target. However, it also acknowledged that previous governments shared responsibility in failing to reduce emissions during their tenures. Nonetheless, the slow pace of emissions reductions, particularly following the target’s implementation, calls into question the integrity of Trudeau’s commitment to reducing Canada’s GHG emissions. So, despite being an important symbolic milestone in Canadian climate policy, the net-zero target may not have the significant long-term impact it was designed to achieve.

The Carbon Tax

In the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, the Trudeau-era climate policy with which Canadians have become most familiar is the federal carbon tax. Implemented in June 2018 as the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (GGPPA), the federal carbon tax has two main components. The first is a consumer fuel charge, a tax applied to twenty-one fossil fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and natural gas. When discussing the carbon tax, Canadian politicians are generally referring to this aspect of the GGPPA. The second is the output-based pricing system (OBPS), which charges industrial facilities whose emissions exceed a certain threshold at a different rate. Revenue from this system is then redistributed to Canadians through the Canada Carbon Rebate (CCR), a regular flat rate payment according to household size. The aim of the CCR is to incentivize Canadian consumers to pollute less by charging them on a per capita basis: those who pollute less pay less, and thus gain more from the rebate.

While the climate tax has been lauded by economists as an integral policy to help Canada to meet its net-zero by 2050 target, the Liberals struggled to effectively communicate the consumer side of the policy to Canadians: in January 2024, for instance, Abacus Data polling indicated that only half of Canadians in jurisdictions with the CCR believed they had received the rebate, despite the eligible number being much higher (Coletto, 2025). A major reason for this confusion was the Liberal’s 2016 communications policy. Designed to limit partisan government ads, the measures also restricted the government’s ability to explain its policies. Further worsening the issue, banks have often listed the rebate under an ambiguous title, such as “ETF Deposit From Canada.” (Chang, 2024) Still, for a brief moment the consumer fuel charge seemed to have become a resolved issue: in the 2021 election, all major federal parties campaigned on one. Following rising inflation rates in 2021-2022, however, Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre took to blaming Canadians’ economic hardships on the fuel charge, pledging to “axe the tax” if elected in the upcoming 2025 federal bid (CBC, 2024). With the tax currently comprising 8-9% of Canada’s total emissions reductions by 2030, according to the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI), scrapping it would be a major blow to the country’s long-term GHG emissions reductions (Beaugin et. al, 2024).

Nonetheless, removing the consumer rate would still leave the industry OBPS intact, which, according to the same CCI report, accounts for between 20% and 48% of emissions reductions in the same period, a much larger portion. Wary of accusations that he may be pandering to elite business interests, Poilievre has refrained from targeting the OBPS, meaning that, despite a near inevitable revision of the carbon tax in the near future, the legislation seems as though it will have a legacy beyond Trudeau’s tenure.

The Trans Mountain Pipeline

Lastly, in a controversial move, Trudeau purchased the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project, a twinning of the existing pipeline running from Edmonton, Alberta to Burnaby, British Columbia. Initially pitched by Kinder Morgan Canada, an energy infrastructure company, in 2012, the project became embroiled in environmental and indigenous opposition, leading the federal government to acquire the project for 4.5 billion in 2018 (Zimonjic and Ling, 2018). By 2023, the project was being priced at 30.9 billion, in what McGill University professor of political science Amy Janzwood described as “the government’s largest ever fossil fuel subsidy.” (Janzwood, 2024)

Fossil fuel industry representatives insist that the project can remain compatible with Canada’s climate goals by simultaneously expanding carbon capture and storage technologies. However, there exist many issues with this approach. Perhaps most critically, with global demand for coal, oil, and natural gas all expected to peak before 2030, according to a 2024 International Energy Agency (IEA) report, the future of Canada’s fossil fuel industries looks increasingly uncertain (Cozzi and Gould, 2024; Leach, 2023). Furthermore, the IEA has described the feasibility of developing the carbon capture capacity necessary to offset GHG emissions without also moving away from fossil fuels as “inconceivable.” (IEA, 2023) By purchasing the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the federal government entrenched its support for continued oil and gas growth, exacerbating the industry’s damaging environmental effects and leaving the Canadian economy without a robust insurance plan upon the industry’s predicted stagnation. 

Conclusion

Taken together, what can be said about Trudeau’s climate legacy? 

In a recent post, the Canada Climate Action Network, a coalition of 160+ climate advocacy groups, poignantly summarized their assessment of Trudeau’s climate policy this way: “more on climate action than any other Prime Minister — and less than what’s needed for a safe future.” (CAN-Rac Canada, 2025) Despite moving Canada forward on many important climate measures, including the net-zero target and the carbon tax, Trudeau has been unable to successfully shift the Canadian economy away from fossil fuels, the largest contributor to GHG emissions in Canada and a potentially volatile future economic asset (Kopecky, 2024). This policy failure, highlighted by the Trans Mountain Pipeline purchase, indicates a major roadblock in advancing Canada’s climate goals, in two ways. First, judging by current numbers, continued fossil fuel growth is significantly detracting from gains made by emission reduction policies. In the long-term, Canada’s fossil fuel policy portends to worse outcomes for Candians due to climate change rather than a robust carbon-neutral future (CCI, 2020). So, while Trudeau’s framework to mitigate the impacts of climate change in Canada was in some ways a comprehensive and significant success, the simultaneous advancement of the country’s dependence on fossil fuels will remain a glaring blemish on his climate efforts.

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References:

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