Back in 2019, our interview was cut short by the appearance of a musk ox on the ridge above us. This time, we had enough time to cover more ground: the harassment McKenna suffered and where that came from, what’s happening to her policy legacy under this new government, and the pitfalls of making deals with the oil patch.
I want to start with the misogyny that you faced in office, which was unfortunately a defining part of a lot of your time in Ottawa. What is it about climate and the environment that attracts that kind of misogyny and lashing-out?
You can separate it into components. Shannon Phillips, Catherine Hayhoe and I, we would talk about this — like there was a percentage that were real people. Often men that were worried about their jobs in fossil fuels, whether it’s oil and gas or coal, and I think that is hard, right? The energy transition means we’ve got to get out of coal, oil and gas, although none of it was ever going to be immediate. I think that there are real fears and concerns.
There was a Just Transition Task Force. They went to communities, and people were mad, and they were sad and they were worried. I mean, often they knew their kids didn’t want to work, for example, mining coal. But they had real fears. They had very reasonable things like early retirement or job retraining or investments in infrastructure in their community. But, I mean, there is a segment where that is the real thing.
The problem is, it’s not just that. There are other pieces to this. So part of it is, these often Conservative politicians, not Progressive Conservatives, but Conservatives, who would say things, personal attacks that were intended to make people mad. So they would say something like I was creating a “job killing carbon tax.” I mean, “climate Barbie” was obviously misogynistic and made me look like a bimbo and only there because I was a woman. But the other piece was like, I’m taking people’s jobs, which, I mean, it’s a revenue neutral carbon price. Wasn’t really true.
They would go viral. Then you would have trolls and bots. Often, just bots. There were organized campaigns. Then you would have rage farming outlets that would repeat it, and then algorithms would do their work for the social media company.
It’s easy to say climate itself is super polarizing. The challenge we have is, yes, there are real issues that impact real people, but there’s tons of disinformation; a lot of that is fed by oil and gas companies themselves.
It’s hard to know what you do in that context. For a long time, I just ignored it.
You’ve said that you want to support younger women getting into politics, and this appears to be a part of that project to encourage more diversity in politics and push more women to get into politics. Are there women in politics today that you’re really inspired by?
I just met with a bunch of female BC, NDP, MLAs, there were ministers. They’re amazing.
I just think, first of all, stepping up — like that is a really courageous step. I don’t think it has to be like you’re some superstar and you really stand out.
And unfortunately, we don’t have enough women in positions where you hear enough from them. Because we now have one premier that’s a woman who I think is really good —
Danielle Smith?
— No. Oh, sorry, forgot about her. Sorry, I was wrong. We have two premiers that are women, I forgot. Just put her in a totally other category. The premier of New Brunswick [Susan Holt]. It’s great to see so many women. And I heard the numbers from BC where there’s majority women, which is really heartening, because in most places, that is absolutely not the case.
The thing about my book that I did worry about: I write in quite a bit of detail about the abuse I got. I don’t even tell all the stories, but I go into detail often, because I think it’s just important for people to understand what is really going on. And I thought, Well, should I do this? If I put this out there, are women really going to want to go into politics?
We need change. You’re seeing really high numbers of women leaving politics.
Your successor’s successor, Julie Dabrusin —
I think it’s my successor’s, successor’s, successor.
I suppose what I should say is “the current environment minister” for clarity. She has been much quieter, and a lot less present than you were. What do you think is behind that?
People have different styles. My style was to be out there and speak to people. This is a new government. It may also be that everyone’s just trying to figure out how this fits in. You’re thrust into this, and it is always a real challenge with the prime minister’s office. So you have to be careful about, are you aligned with the government’s policies?
I do think it is really important that the environment minister is out there speaking about the environment and climate, that people are looking for people in those roles to speak up, and they want to understand why the government is taking certain actions or not taking certain actions.
Today and yesterday we’re hearing from MPs, [Victoria MP] Will Greaves among them, saying he’s hearing from a lot of constituents saying that they’re very upset about the potential for a new pipeline, that they don’t feel like this is at all reflective of what they want. And he himself is opposed to a new pipeline.
I am hearing that too (laughs).
Well you yourself have been through this, right? You suffered through years of “you bought a pipeline” lobbed at your government. What are you feeling in this moment? What advice would you offer to members of the government?
First of all, it’s very unclear what is happening in this context. There’s apparently an MOU that’s going to drop and no one really knows what’s in it. Look, I’ve talked about this, I’ve written articles about this. I tried to work with Alberta and with the oil and gas industry in particular. And initially, that was with the Alberta government under Rachel Notley. They had put a cap on emissions, a price on pollution across the board, tough methane regs, and we built our climate plan around that. And the oil and gas companies stood with Rachel Notley, on stage with Indigenous leaders, with environmentalists, and said, they supported this.
And look at where we are now.
We did buy a pipeline because we felt there was a need to still get Alberta’s oil to market. That’s not an excuse, but it was seen as a way to keep Alberta on side with the climate plan.
And what did we get? We just got a super expensive pipeline, completely over budget being paid for by Canadian taxpayers. We have oil and gas companies in Alberta under a new government that’s gone back on all of the regulations, and is fighting all of the regulations that were agreed to as part of this idea of moving ahead on a pipeline.
We have oil and gas companies that committed to net zero and then took their massive record, historic profits and gave them back in massive bonuses to their CEOs and executives, and through share buybacks largely to Americans. So here we are again. They did not live up to their end of the bargain under any stretch of the imagination.
I would never trust them.
I think it is worrying. Although Mark Carney knows more about climate than almost anyone. We are paying the price for climate change, and all of those risks are much greater. The flipside is, 10 years later, we have all these solutions that we had no idea would be much cheaper and at scale. The opportunities are massive for Canada, like electrifying everything, huge investments in renewables. We have a huge auto sector, electric vehicles, critical minerals, where we actually process them ourselves, refine them ourselves. So there are these opportunities, but instead, we’re stuck on a pipeline project that, literally, will not go ahead.
[UK-based Carbon Tracker] released a report last week, and the report found that under IEA projections, which are generally conservative, provincial revenues will be hit very hard in the 2030s. Alberta’s [oil and gas] revenues will be down 85 per cent; BC’s revenues down 72 per cent; Saskatchewan revenues down 78 per cent; Newfoundland’s are almost wiped out.
We’re betting on something that is Pyrrhic: you may be getting money right now, but there isn’t going to be demand.
Your report to the UN was called “Integrity Matters.” Carney was elected in part on his climate credentials. A lot of climate people — yourself included — threw their weight behind him, and all we’ve seen from Carney so far has been jettisoning of climate policy. Every single policy decision around climate so far has been to weaken it. Do you think he’s acting with integrity on climate?
I think he knows as well as anyone that your emissions have to go down. Real emissions, not emissions intensity of oil sands.
We haven’t seen the details of the plan, but he has said we were committed to our target, and so with this [pipeline] announcement, it’s going to be even harder. If we’re actually going back on key policies, on the biggest polluter in our country, which is Alberta and oil sands, and we’re talking about a pipeline that’s going to increase production, that is going to be extremely challenging.
And the question of how you square that circle, I don’t know, but it will require very significant strengthening of key policies.
So here he is negotiating another “grand bargain.” You’ve been down that road before, as you mentioned. Do you think he’s being naive?
I think Mark Carney is and they had lots of experience negotiating. I can just talk about my experience. I was naive. I thought when someone said they had a deal, we had a deal. And we got nothing.
Oil and gas is a third of our emissions, and they take us for fools by taking the money, they make massive record profits and commit to doing things on climate change and then give them back to US shareholders and CEOs.
So I would say there is a lesson to be learned. The Alberta government doesn’t seem to care about climate change, like they’re making this a national unity issue, if they don’t get a pipeline. Well, what about everyone in Canada who cares about climate? Eighty-five thousand people were evacuated from their communities this summer. We have to act on climate and integrity does matter, and you can’t be like oil and gas companies, or Danielle Smith, or the federal government saying you’re committed to net zero by 2050, you got to do the work now.
You told [CBC’s] Gloria Macarenko yesterday, “nothing is harder than working on climate.” What is it that makes it so hard? Why can’t we make any progress on this?
I have a mug. It’s in this book, and it says “Climate is an everything thing.”
The challenge is, you can’t just be working on “climate.” As environment minister, I saw that firsthand.
There’s some things I could do. Much of it is regulate, like, put a price on pollution, or methane regulations. But you need to also make investments. So that means you need finance or you need innovation on your side; you also need to think about it as an Indigenous issue. These major projects have massive impacts on Indigenous peoples. They’re often the most impacted by climate change, and they have solutions. It’s also a transition issue, so you’ve got to think about workers and jobs and what a fair transition looks like for everyone. It’s got so many elements to it that that makes it really hard.
But what is really hard right now is the fact that oil and gas companies, and their well funded lobbyists, are everywhere spouting things that are just not true. And I think this is a real problem, the access they get to politicians, because folks working on climate — there are a lot of people working on climate — but no funding comparable to what oil and gas has. And you can see the billboards downtown Ottawa that are targeting politicians, talking about how our future is oil and gas.
There are all these false narratives, like, “everyone’s going to lose jobs if we get off fossil fuels.” By the way, we’ve had an increase in production, and jobs have gone down because of automation. Of course, the oil and gas sector would rather have no employees if they could, right? They’re a company, and their goal is to pollute as much and get as much production as possible, make as much money as possible with the least work possible, and pay to clean up their pollution as little as possible.
Mark Carney has recently said that Canada’s feminist foreign policy is over. Do you know what he means? Does it feel like a step backward to you?
I talk about it in this, in my book, that when prime minister [Justin Trudeau] announced cabinet, he said it’s gonna be 50 per cent women. When he was asked why, he said, “Because it’s 2015.”
The problem is, and I will say this is part of the challenge of the past government, words have to have meaning. For sure, having 50 per cent women in the government was great. And, that’s a very clear outcome. The reality is, I worked in peacekeeping, so when we announced the feminist foreign policy, I was like, I’m not exactly sure what it means. And then it was going to be, we’re going to have all these female peacekeepers. We never really had any. We have not invested in peacekeeping, which, in theory, helps a lot of women and girls who are caught up in conflict.
So I’m not sure we can’t just jump to things by saying he’s taking the words out of feminist foreign policy. That means we don’t care about women and girls.
There were a lot of things attached to the word “feminist,” which — I know it’s at my own peril that I say this — I’m a feminist, but every day, I didn’t wake up and say, “I’m going to go work on climate because I’m a feminist.” I worked on climate because that was an issue. This was one thing that I was concerned about: like, what are we doing that makes this a feminist foreign policy? I saw this in the context of climate, where we were told investments in climate needed to be seen from a feminist lens. And I said, what will help women is we actually tackle climate change because they’re disproportionately impacted.
I’m all for quotas and all these things are real outcomes. But outcomes are outcomes. You have to do the work and you have to see an actual outcome.
It’s kind of like climate. I don’t care why people care about climate. I don’t care if they care about it because they think it’s cool, or it’s more jobs, or it’s innovation, or it’s because they are Catholic and the Pope has talked about it, or that they care about Indigenous issues, or they see it as a health issue. I don’t care. I just care that people care about climate and we’d better do a better job how we talk about things in a way that people can relate to.
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