Canada’s former climate minister on making a change, ‘aloof’...

Imagine there was a truck heading directly for your children. What would you do? Surely everything in your power to save them, including jumping in its way? Catherine McKenna, formerly the Canadian minister for environment and climate change, borrows this analogy for the climate crisis from a colleague to argue that we need to use “all the tools at our disposal” to tackle devastating danger that is already with us.

McKenna has recently published Run Like a Girl, which documents her time in government, among other things. Peppered with inspirational quotes, personal photos and campaign memorabilia, Run Like a Girl isn’t a straightforward memoir. She wrote it for “women and young people who want to make change”.

Despite the upbeat tone, McKenna is forthright about thorny issues, such as the sexism she experienced while in office; one Conservative opponent referred to her as “climate Barbie”. She has received a barrage of online abuse, including death threats. She recounts a scary experience where she was walking down the street with her three children when a man started swearing at them and filming the interaction.

“There are a lot of amazing young people who are doing amazing things,” McKenna says. “But it can be hard and demoralising.” She doesn’t want people to give up, however. The important thing, she says, is to keep trying.

While her grandfather was a member of the Irish Volunteers and her father was “an old-school Pierre Trudeau liberal”, McKenna didn’t set out to become a politician – instead, she wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. When that didn’t work out, however, she channelled the discipline in other directions, including politics.

McKenna is candid about her political career, the challenges facing the world and the disastrous impact of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. She also doesn’t hold back about former boss Justin Trudeau, describing him as “aloof” and seemingly disinterested “in his ministers or caucus members beyond his childhood friends”. His constant references to the gender-balanced cabinet, she argues, “started to sound like a marketing ploy or gimmick to make him look good”.

But when it came to the climate, Trudeau shared her belief in taking action, and supported her.

While under consistent attack by the right, McKenna oversaw what became a flagship policy, a carbon tax on large industrial polluters and on everyday fossil fuel usage – petrol, diesel and natural gas. McKenna called it a price on pollution. Crucially, money went back to Canadians through a rebate system that benefited low and middle income people the most, with one report finding most households being protected from the impact of the tax and some even making a financial gain.

She admits that when she became minister for energy and climate change in 2015, she was “not an expert in that space”; she had no idea what COP stood for. But a week after taking the post, she attended COP21, where the Paris agreement – the first universal, legally binding treaty on climate – was signed.

She’s proud of what they achieved, even amid criticism that the agreement didn’t do enough. “I’m not someone who has massive regrets or says, ‘oh, if only we’ve done this … ’, because it was a particular moment in time.” We shouldn’t understate the importance of the Paris agreement, she adds. “For the first time ever, we had a clear temperature goal and every country had to do their part. Was it imperfect? Yes. But net zero wasn’t even a concept in 2015.” The world was on track for 5C warming, she says, and this created pressure on governments.

But there are big contradictions within the climate record of the Trudeau government. In the summer of 2019, less than 24 hours after the House passed a motion to declare that Canada was in a climate emergency, the government approved plans to triple the capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which transports oil to British Colombia from tar sands in Alberta, a uniquely environmentally ruinous place for extraction. Tripling its capacity would remedy a problem for the industry: too much oil through too few pipelines meant oil sold at a discount to the rest of the world. The year before, Trudeau’s government had bought the pipeline for $4.5bn after the company tasked with the expansion threatened to walk away from the project because of protests and a legal challenge.

Though McKenna was “floored” by the timing of the announcement, she convinced herself it was necessary to achieve consensus on the climate, bringing along provinces like Alberta. This wasn’t a case of greenwashing, she says – they genuinely believed they could bring everyone together. It’s one of her few regrets. “I think [we were] taken for fools [by the oil and gas industry].” The impacts were disastrous: in 2023, Canada was the only G7 nation to emit greenhouse gases well above its 1990 levels.

After McKenna stepped down in 2021, Trudeau announced a pause on the carbon tax, while one of Mark Carney’s first moves after becoming prime minister of Canada was to kill off the carbon tax altogether.

She remains hopeful, though. “I am a realistic optimist … We just have to keep on making the very economic, logical case to folks.” That includes engaging with the heavy emitters and corporate and financial institutions – you have to talk their language, she says. Instead of focusing on individual change, we should be looking at them.

She is direct and authoritative, but I’m curious about the tensions here. Are big companies really going to behave all that differently from the oil and gas industry? And will they deliver at the pace that’s needed? Is targeting business using “all the tools at our disposal”? To really save the children from the truck, do we need to be putting more effort into new strategies?

McKenna points to renewables – they are cheaper than fossil fuels, more efficient and everyone can access them. “Government policy has to catch up … [we] have a lot of impediments from the regulatory side. The political headwinds created by Trump are so hard to contend with, but it’s much closer to the business cycle for business people.”

The academic Brett Christophers has argued that it’s not the cost of renewables projects that prevents them from being built, but the thin profit margins involved. McKenna says we have to be rational about the climate, but I wonder what we do if the economically rational decision for big business in a particular moment isn’t in the interests of the climate?

McKenna wants the public to apply pressure on politicians, too. In the book she writes about a huge protest march planned the day after the Trans Mountain pipeline was greenlit. Her colleagues avoided it at all costs, but McKenna went out on to the street with the protesters.

“We didn’t do enough, but I needed them to push us as a government to do more,” she says. “Marching does matter.”