It sucks that we had no realistic (as in actually able to win) alternative. Not exactly thrilled with him, but he is clearly better than the other possible leader we could have been stuck with.
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Did anyone ever think he was a climate guy? He was voted for mostly being neither Trudeau nor Poilievre. It's been a big positive otherwise that he's a true statesman, but I can't imagine what would have made anyone think he was a climate guy.
The people who appointed him UN special envoy for climate action probably thought he was a climate guy. The people who read his book (not me) seemed to think he was a climate guy. The people who believed his election campaign promises might've thought he was a climate guy. He probably still thinks he's a climate guy.
He talks a lot about the importance of climate change, so it comes as a surprise to quite a few people that he doesn't seem to be in favour of doing anything about it.
What kbal said, but also, let's be real here: nobody who's not taking the climate emergency seriously is a "true statesman". It's just plain unserious and irresponsible, like calling a junkie who says "oh I'll just have one shot of heroin this Friday and I'm going to check myself into rehab Monday" committed to getting clean. That's not statesmanship, it's just profound luck of seriousness in the face of overwhelming evidence. Any politician who's not "a climate guy" is by definition a clown.
Exactly! The climate is a major issue facing the entire planet, even the fucking US army considers it a threat, so to act like it’s not important is immediate disqualification from being able to say you care about the country.
Besides, it’s not like he’s actually done anything else statesmanlike, either.
First thing he did was kill the carbon levy, misbranded by our US owned media as a "tax".
Oh has he been? Like the attacking unions and workers strikes, fucking around with pipelines, helping private O&G companies take our stuff, or floating the idea of privatizing airports? Or his sovereign wealth fund that doesn’t actually work the way one of those should? There are all the ads I see about how the government is supposedly saving me money but the net effect if their actions is doing worse for me than before. Oh, and let us not forget about how he’s giving over $8bil in 50% off development fee funding to Ontario so that private home builders can pocket some extra money while they continue to raise prices, all paid for by us because he won’t tax rich people.
Yea, real statesmanlike behaviour. He’s just another piece of shit conservative whose only positive is that he doesn’t seem to hate gay people.
No one who understands what bankers stand for ever thought he would be a climate guy.
Woooow really? Who woulda thunk that the ultra capitalist establishment guy would do such things?
To people who keeps thinking that Carney's playing along with realpolitik given the situation we're in, I for one don't buy that playing according to these realities and trying to move the country away from fossil fuel is mutually exclusive. You can play along with Smith, Poilievre, Trump, but you also have so many other provinces where you could be pushing towards that greener future. You're governing a nation, not a city state with extremely limited resources and a small monocultural population.
Now, I'm not saying that nothing is done by Carney's gov. They've been doing some stuff, but they're mostly financial instruments aimed at industries. The approaches so far have been largely crticized as insufficient to highly insufficient. The theme from the government seems to be this: they want both green and fossil fuel industries to thrive. I find that grossly naive: green industries are young and budding and it's difficult for them to survive, whereas fossil fuel industries are established and have the space and resources to keep finding ways to kill green industries to prevent them green industries from eating their pie.
To clarify, one of the things Carney's gov is doing in the green space is to offer grants for companies looking to go into green battery tech. This is a pretty important piece of technology that's still quite the question mark to be fair: as in, what even is this? Many look to hydrogen and I know a professor who's actively working on hydrogen batteries, but it's gonna take a good while to get that to a place where we as end consumers see it in our day-to-day. Meanwhile, it seems like we're building a gigefactory to produce EV batteries in St Thomas, Ontario, with Volkswagen, but that's likely using tech we already know, i.e. lithium-ion. It also seems like the planned primary supplier of lithium is going to be from a company in Quebec, which uses mines around North America.
Now, I'm not saying Carney's recent O&G-friendly posture is not abhorrent to see; I'm actually appalled by it. There's a part of me that hopes that this is the feds trying to throw Alberta a lifeline to get them out of the O&G hellhole by trying to push them towards so-called "Blue Hydrogens" (which I know isn't a great resource given the reliance on O&G still and having to rely on these industries in making sure harmful emissions like methane are properly contained), which will later bring them to green once they have more infra to support a less carbonated society, but the way Carney's gov has handled the messaging does not stoke any confidence in that being the case. I mean, if that is the goal, why aren't they saying it, right? And from what we know about Smith, there's no guarantee that Alberta will going to work towards Blue Hydrogens, and we'd just be giving O&G companies freebies to continue tearing our lives apart.

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