This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Anthony De Luca-Baratta, January 6, 2025
In 2019, the American writer Rob Henderson coined the term “luxury belief” to refer to “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” In slightly altered form, this concept neatly captures the past decade of environmental activism in Canada. Progressives resolutely opposed the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of workers in parts of the country who depend on it for their livelihoods. But as the recent energy deal between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith shows, an increasing number of Canadians are abandoning this luxury belief.
According to a recent Angus Reid poll, 60 per cent of Canadians support the construction of an Alberta-British Columbia pipeline under the agreement, including 53 per cent in B.C. and 50 per cent in environmentalist Quebec. A decade ago, only 37 per cent of B.C. residents supported the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have carried crude oil from northern Alberta to the northern B.C. coast. Similarly, according to a 2015 poll, 57 per cent of Quebecers opposed the proposed Energy East pipeline, which would have linked the Albertan oil sands to Quebec’s East coast.
Contrast this clear opposition to the recent Angus Reid poll and other similar findings, and a large-scale shift in public opinion seems undeniable. In February 2025, at the height of trade tensions with the United States, 59 per cent of Quebecers reported wanting to revive Energy East. Large majorities in every province agreed that Canada needed oil and gas pipelines from sea to sea, ranging from a low of 74 per cent in Quebec to a high of 89 per cent in Alberta. So what changed?
The truth is that Canadians could afford to pursue abstract environmental goals when things were going relatively well. The glow of green virtue was enticing when housing was relatively affordable, inflation was a non-issue, and the Canadian middle class was, as the New York Times suggested in April 2014, the most affluent on the planet.
To read that New York Times story today is to rediscover an alien world. If you can believe it — and many young Canadians surely won’t — median income in Canada was once higher than median income in the United States. It was once possible to view relatively high home values as a boon to the middle class because people still believed that owning a house was a realistic near-term possibility for most people. The ability to pay for “mobile-phone plans” apparently topped Canadians’ list of economic concerns.
Enter Justin Trudeau, the handsome harbinger of a sunnier, greener Canada. Riding the coattails of a decade of responsible economic management, Trudeau told us that we could legislate our way to a clean energy utopia without threatening the economic dynamism that underpinned Canadian prosperity. And we believed him.
One long, painful decade later, we no longer do. Today, median income in Canada has fallen below that of the United States while our tax burden remains much higher. Many young people might never own a home. Business investment and per capita income are increasingly lagging the rest of the developed world.
To be sure, Trudeau is not solely responsible for these woes. But he did the country grave harm by ignoring basic principles that any Economics 101 student could have taught him. For instance, making business more costly results in less business. The fact that this was not always obvious is a tad depressing, but alas, Trudeau’s government introduced a slew of regulations — many of them in the name of fighting climate change — that made it much more difficult to build major infrastructure projects. Business executives have consistently reported that such rules increased costs and uncertainty, making them reluctant to invest in Canada, especially in the resource sector.
Now add skyrocketing housing and grocery prices and a trade war with the United States, and it is little surprise that Canadians are abandoning Trudeau’s environmental ship in droves. It turns out we were never a country with a strong ideological commitment to the “green economy.” Rather, we were a country with so little to worry about that activism for a fashionable cause seemed like as worthy a way as any to feel good about ourselves, even if it came at a high cost to many of our fellow citizens.
That moment is over. Targets set by suits in Paris mean little when the strong economy we took for granted is a distant memory and our most important trading partner is threatening a painful divorce. A full 16 per cent of Canadian GDP and 1.8 million jobs depend on the resource sector. We are simply not willing to pretend this reality away anymore. Canadians are thinking pragmatically because we can no longer afford not to.
Anthony De Luca-Baratta is a contributor to the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, a project of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a Young Voices Senior Contributor based in Montreal. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.
