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Justin Trudeau will step down as Canada’s prime minister after the Liberal Party picks a new leader, ending a near-decade of the most climate-conscious federal government in modern history.
Trudeau made the announcement on a chilly Ottawa morning outside his residence, Rideau Cottage. It ended months of speculation over his future, after dozens of his fellow caucus members have publicly called on him to resign so a new leader can be chosen.
“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” he said on Monday.
Trudeau led the Liberal Party to a majority in 2015 and won two more elections as a minority government in 2019 and 2021. He has been prime minister for just over nine years, leading Canada through the first Trump administration and its re-negotiation of the North American free trade deal, and then the COVID-19 pandemic.
But for more than a year, he and his Liberal Party have sunk in the polls. After U.S. president-elect Donald Trump threatened to impose severe tariffs on Canadian imports this fall, Trudeau’s former finance minister Chrystia Freeland found herself at odds with the prime minister over the best way forward for the country. Freeland abruptly quit her post in December, saying Trudeau had tried to replace her with former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, a presumed Liberal leadership contender. The move sent Trudeau into self-reflection mode over the holidays.
During their nine years in power the Trudeau Liberals have campaigned politically on fighting climate change and passed a number of climate-related laws, while also buying a massive pipeline project. According to a December 2024 estimate from Environment and Climate Change Canada, industrial emissions dropped to 694 million tonnes in 2023, the lowest level in 27 years, excluding the pandemic. The government said this is the result of its climate plan, as projections made in 2015 at the start of the Trudeau government were for Canada’s emissions to increase nine per cent by 2030.
Trudeau has “accomplished more on climate action than any other Canadian prime minister,” despite falling short in a number of areas, Climate Action Network Canada said Monday.
“The past 10 years have seen a revolution in how we tackle climate change in Canada,” the organization’s executive director, Caroline Brouillette, said in a statement.
“Yet at the same time, under Justin Trudeau, we have seen that no climate approach will be successful without dismantling the fossil fuel industry’s grip on Canada’s policy and politics, and challenging the colonial and neoliberal models that have captured our institutions.”
In his resignation speech, Trudeau touted his government’s efforts to “fight climate change and get our economy ready for the future” as a part of his legacy. The Narwhal has put together a non-exhaustive list of some of these efforts below, based on the impact they have had.
Entrenching net-zero emissions accountability in domestic law
After the Conservative government of Stephen Harper pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, with the former prime minister dismissing it as a “socialist scheme,” members of the just-elected Trudeau government gathered in France in 2015 to help hammer out the details of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which has been the world’s international climate treaty ever since. But beyond making promises internationally, the Liberals went further and passed the Net Zero Emissions Accountability Act, a domestic law that mandates Canada’s federal government come up with national emissions reduction targets every five years, and plans to achieve those targets, with the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. It was the first time Canada has seen anything like this type of legislation.
Purchasing, and then building, the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion
One of Trudeau’s most physically enduring climate legacies will be the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion, which his government initially spent $4.5 billion to buy, but ended up spending $34 billion in total to finish building. In contrast to other major proposed oil pipelines over the last decade like Keystone XL, this one actually got built and is now transporting gobs of fresh oil. The roughly 1,000 kilometres of new pipeline nearly tripled the system’s capacity, allowing the oilpatch a cheaper and easier way to continue growing production, which has been tied to rising carbon pollution levels. The expanded pipeline also ushered in a new era of increased tanker traffic in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. The expanded pipeline’s effects on Canada and the planet will be felt for years.
Establishing the carbon pricing regime, and having the Supreme Court validate it
Trudeau rode to power in 2015 on a promise to implement carbon pricing, and continued winning elections running on it, in 2019 and 2021. The policy was also validated as constitutional by the Supreme Court after a bitter court battle. Over almost 10 years, the idea or reality of nationwide carbon pricing has been everywhere in political conversations in Canada, for better or worse. Economists steadfastly agree it’s the most efficient way of tackling carbon pollution, the majority of Canadian families are financially better off under the program and research has shown it has a negligible effect on inflation. But it has been targeted politically by multiple conservative-leaning provincial governments and the federal Conservative Party. It remains in the headlines now, as enemy number one for the official opposition Conservatives who are framing the upcoming federal vote as one to “axe the tax.”
Revamping Canada’s environmental assessment regime for big projects
Canada’s system for evaluating the environmental implications of major projects was revamped by the Harper government, but when the Trudeau Liberals were elected they established an expert panel to review it. The panel found the regime imposed unrealistically short timelines and made the number of projects subject to review too narrow. Trudeau revamped the system yet again, adding a required early planning phase, for example, that is supposed to involve dialogue with Indigenous Peoples, and requirements that decisions are supposed to be guided by science. The Supreme Court challenged parts of the Impact Assessment Act but the government passed amendments in 2024 that it said brought it into constitutional compliance again. The Conservatives, if elected, plan to dismantle the latest version of the assessment regime.
Putting in place restrictions on oil and gas sector methane pollution
Tackling methane pollution from the oil and gas sector is a relatively straightforward way to enact climate policy. Some companies simply emit methane gas from their operations on purpose because it’s not economical to capture, while it also leaks from equipment. The Trudeau government committed in 2016 to cut methane — a potent greenhouse gas — from the oil and gas sector and passed regulations two years later, with the rules coming into force starting in 2020. The government also cut deals with some higher-emitting provinces to allow them to implement their own methane rules considered equivalent to federal standards. The Liberals have since proposed more ambitious methane rules but their final version has yet to be implemented.
Funding Indigenous-led conservation efforts
To date, Trudeau has provided more than $1.2 billion to Indigenous-led conservation efforts since 2018. This includes $800 million announced in December 2022 for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas that will support First Nations, Inuit and Métis in protecting up to one million square kilometres of land and water. Indigenous Peoples have protected and stewarded land and wildlife for generations, but federal funding — as well as from other sources — supports guardians programs to oversee protected areas and communities to establish and maintain them.
Passing provisions to crack down on greenwashing by corporations
The Trudeau government created new rules to crack down on corporate attempts at greenwashing, or making their products appear friendlier to the environment than they really are. In particular, thanks to the efforts of some MPs that worked to strengthen the government’s proposed rules while they were being debated in Parliament, the greenwashing provisions made a big splash when they passed in mid-2024. Many oil and gas companies took information off their websites or social media as a result. At the same time, it’s unclear how much greenwashing the new rules will actually deter, especially if a future federal government itself begins embracing or parroting the marketing campaigns of the oil and gas industry.
Giving Canadians the legal ‘right to a healthy environment’
The Government of Canada recognizes that “every individual in Canada has a right to a healthy environment,” as provided under the country’s main federal environmental protection law. The Trudeau Liberals inserted that right into law in 2023, which means the government now has a duty to protect that right when it makes decisions under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. But exactly how this right will help average Canadians is still unclear. A “framework” outlining how the right to a healthy environment would be considered is supposed to be published in “summer 2025.”
Recognizing the problem of environmental racism
Last June, the Trudeau government passed a law that will require it to develop a national strategy on environmental racism within two years. As outlined in the legislation sponsored by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, the national strategy must include “an examination of the link between race, socio-economic status and environmental risk” and steps that can be taken to address the reasons climate impacts are felt acutely in Indigenous and racialized communities. With an election coming up, it is unclear what progress has been made — or could be made — on this strategy.
Giving companies tax breaks for buying carbon capture equipment
Trudeau’s government first proposed giving companies a tax break for money they spent on carbon capture equipment in 2021, but the budget measure only passed in 2024. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated this would cost Canada almost $6 billion through 2027-28. The government argues the carbon capture tax break will kickstart oil and gas companies building the necessary equipment to capture more of their carbon pollution. But environmental groups have wondered how much sense the tax break makes given the technology has not shown to be 100 per cent effective in several previous implementations, and has not been deployed at a scale wide enough to make a big dent in pollution in Canada’s oilpatch.
Committing to protect biodiversity
In 2020, under Trudeau’s government, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to pledge to conserve 30 per cent of land and waters by 2030. Two years later, at the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal, Canada helped shepherd 196 countries to a new international agreement that aims to stem a global biodiversity crisis that’s put more than one million species at risk of extinction. The government has made many signals to meet these commitments, but Canada remains a long way from achieving them. By the end of 2023, just 13.7 per cent of land and 14.7 per cent of marine areas had been protected.
Promising to plant billions of trees
In 2019, Trudeau announced the 2 Billion Trees program. He pledged that planting a massive number of seedlings in 10 years would significantly curb Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions as new forests absorb carbon and mitigate extreme heat. But the program exists more as a slogan than real climate action, mired in complaints about complex regulations and bad planning. As a result, the federal government did not meet its targets last year. The federal environment commissioner found less than three per cent of the promised total has been planted so far, and the government is using some “creative accounting” to continuously say it is exceeding its targets.
Capping the carbon pollution from the oil and gas industry
The oil and gas sector is Canada’s biggest source of carbon pollution, and since 2021 the government has promised to limit, or cap, the amount of emissions the sector is allowed to generate. The federal government has never tried to hold the sector accountable for its pollution like this before. When the Liberals introduced the plan, voices in the industry and political opposition tried to brand it as a de facto cap on production, despite the government’s estimates showing it would only shave off around two weeks’ worth; also despite the industry itself, through the Pathways Alliance of oilsands companies, promoting a plan to decarbonize production using technology like carbon capture, while still pumping out oil. The Trudeau government’s final regulations aren’t expected until next year and are likely to be cancelled if the Conservatives win power.
Phasing out ‘inefficient’ fossil fuel subsidies
Phasing out “inefficient” government subsidies for fossil fuels is something the previous Harper government committed to as part of a 2009 statement by the Group of 20 (G20), but it was the Trudeau government that gave itself a deadline of 2025 for doing so. Phasing them out was part of the government’s stated environmental mandate, and the Environment Department worked on the issue for years, but faced criticism it was taking too narrow a view. The department, for example, did not consider the government’s Trans Mountain purchase a fossil fuel subsidy. A tax break for small businesses, which benefitted more than 1,000 oil and gas companies in 2022, is also not considered a subsidy under the government’s rules.
Letting federal scientists speak with media
Trudeau was first elected on a platform that included a promise to let scientists speak, reversing a culture of silence put in place under Harper. Trudeau lifted these restrictions to great fanfare. He added a minister of science to the cabinet and a chief science advisor to the government’s expert roster. But scientists continue to report restrictions. A 2018 survey found more than half of government scientists in Canada — 53 per cent — feel they cannot speak freely to media about their work. Another survey in 2023 reported 92 per cent of environmental researchers still felt constraints in speaking publicly for fear of negative backlash, reduced career opportunities and breaking away from the institution’s positions on environmental issues.
— With files from Ainslie Cruickshank
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