Mark Carney teams up with Danielle Smith to screw B.C. and First Nations

Who needs consent or safety when you can make money?

In June 2025, the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council stands across from Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada. I don’t think I’m ever happy with the people who work here. | Copyright © Jake Landau, all rights reserved.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith have finally struck their grand bargain between Canada and Alberta. The end result? Climate change will kill us all.

After Smith’s ludicrous threats of Albertan secession, Carney has caved on virtually every environmental policy the Liberals have previously championed, rewarding the Premier’s childish temper tantrum with new privileges that will come at the expense of Alberta’s neighbours.

This is a deal so objectionable that Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, a staunch environmentalist, has resigned from Carney’s cabinet in protest, albeit remaining in caucus on the backbench. The details of this Memorandum of Understanding are now publicly available online, so let’s walk through it together, and see exactly what Carney and Smith have just done to British Columbia, to First Nations, and to the environment.

The objectives of the deal between Carney and Smith’s governments are as follows: Increase oil and gas production while decreasing emissions, increase electrical generation to “[meet] the needs of AI data centres,” reduction of regulations, and “meaningful opportunity” for Indigenous people to consult and gain economic benefits from projects.

Let’s unpack this. For one, you cannot increase production of fossil fuels while decreasing emissions. You can technically emit less when producing the fossil fuels, but that ignores the elephant in the room: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels primarily come from burning those fuels, not from producing them.

Canada can claim to reduce our own emissions, but if other countries are burning the fossil fuels we sell them, we are increasing global emissions, and the damage we do to the global climate will obviously affect Canada, as we are indeed located on this planet!

Furthermore, while as a software programmer I do appreciate that datacentres provide useful compute power, the source of the electricity that powers a data centre matters. My opinion of a datacentre changes heavily based on the source of the power, and also whether it has to pay normal electricity rates or gets a subsidy that we as working-class Canadians do not.

What’s most concerning, however, is the vague language used to handwave “regulations” and “Indigenous consultation”. What government regulations does Carney plan to remove? And what does consultation actually mean, if a project is forced on an Indigenous nation against their will?

In effect, it means that all environmental protections of significance are now gone in Alberta. The industrial carbon tax, which Carney justified as a reason the consumer carton tax was unnecessary, has now been cancelled, as has the Oil and Gas Emissions Cap.

An Albertan bitumen pipeline through Northwest B.C. to the coast will be declared a priority, able to be accelerated through regulatory hurdles by the Major Projects Office. The tanker ban in B.C. waters will be removed in order to facilitate bitumen shipments to Asian markets. Amendments will be made to the Competition Act, removing the anti-greenwashing laws that prevent companies from lying to the public and false claims about their environmental impacts.

A large part of Carney’s justification is that the Pathways carbon capture project is required for the bitumen pipeline to proceed…and yet Pathways removed many claims from their website following the passing of the anti-greenwashing law, implying the benefits of this so-called carbon capture project cannot be materially proven. Indeed, there is overall a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of carbon capture technology.

It’s a fairly large betrayal that a project which would equally involve B.C. has not been initiated as an equal discussion with British Columbians, but rather an edict which Canada and Alberta are forcing down B.C.’s throat. B.C. Premier David Eby is plainly vocal in his complaints, calling this proposed bitumen pipeline an “energy vampire” stealing financing from more important projects.

Canada and Alberta also state that they will consult with, “and where appropriate accommodate” Indigenous people, distorting the meaning of the word “consult”. It is not a consultation if an Indigenous nation has no right to refuse, and it is not a consultation if a settler-colonial construct has the right to unilaterally decide without third-party review whether Indigenous nations will be accommodated, and to what degree.

Indeed, the main “accommodation” explicitly mentioned for B.C. and Indigenous nations is some form of revenue sharing. It is transparent that any bitumen pipeline will involve the colonial tactic of pitting different Indigenous nations along the route against each other; B.C. Coastal First Nations are vehemently opposed because it is their coast which will be affected, and other Indigenous nations are not representative of their specific community.

And make no mistake, the coast will be damaged by oil tankers. The route has volatile waters along a rocky coastline, and Bruce Reid, former regional manager of the Oceans Program for the Pacific with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, makes a very clear case for how an oil spill would be inevitable, severely damaging the $1.3 billion CAD coastal economy.

But Mark Carney and Danielle Smith do not care. The consent of Indigenous peoples, the safety and well-being of our environment, none of these things matter to the greedy oil barons who control Canadian politicians like a puppetmaster pulls strings.

Climate change is winning. Our oceans boil, and our forests burn. It would be one thing if our politicians stood by idly, but it is worse: they are actively helping to kill us all.

I want our children to grow up in a world with clean water, fresh air, and verdant green. But the agreement between Carney and Smith threatens that future…so we must stop them, whatever the cost.