LILLEY: Carney's new cabinet seems pretty radical -- and not in a good way

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Mark Carney wants you to believe that he’s a pragmatist and will govern as one, but the problem is that he’s surrounded by radicals. One of those radicals, whose views mirror Carney’s previous statements on the oil and gas industry, put our new prime minister in a difficult spot Wednesday.

The day after Carney, in an interview with CTV, said he’s open to approving pipelines and getting oil and gas projects moving, former environment minister Stephen Guilbeault said we don’t need any more pipelines or oil.

“If you want a simple answer on, ‘Will I support building a pipeline?’ Yes. That’s a simple answer. I’ve given that multiple times,” Carney said in his interview with CTV’s Vassy Kapelos after cabinet was sworn in.

Carney even went on to say that approving one pipeline wasn’t enough and that Canada needed to do more to become an energy superpower. Seems no one told Guilbeault, who is Carney’s minister of Canadian identity and culture.

“I think before we start talking about building an entire new pipeline, maybe we should maximize the use of existing infrastructure,” Guilbeault said while going on to claim that the Trans Mountain Pipeline is only at 40% capacity.

He also said that there are no investors for a West-to-East pipeline and that global demand for oil will peak in two years. Peak oil is a long-standing theory among environmental radicals like Guilbeault, who believe we will soon hit the highest level of oil use and it will begin to fall.

There were predictions that we would hit peak oil in 2000, then sometime between 2007 and 2009, then 2020 and now, according to Guilbeault, in either 2028 or 2029. He and many others have been wrong every time and they just move the date each time they miss their projection.

This is Guilbeault’s way of saying Canada’s natural resources should stay in the ground. That’s not a very good stance for a minister whose job includes national unity. His comments won’t be welcomed across the Prairies or in Newfoundland and Labrador, where they also rely on the oil and gas sector.

Guilbeault has always been a radical, though. While he’s famous for climbing the CN Tower to protest the oil and gas sector, I first met him almost 25 years ago when he had a bike lock around his neck connecting him to a gas pump at a downtown Montreal service station.

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He and his fellow activists were trying to stop people from using gasoline; now as a member of the government, he wants to shut down the whole industry.

“This is just another example of how misleading and destructive this former environment minister was to Alberta’s and Canada’s economy and investment climate,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said of Guilbeault’s comments.

She called on Carney’s newly appointed Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin to denounce Guilbeault’s comments. That hasn’t happened so far and in a worrisome sign, Dabrusin was a cheerleader of Guilbeault’s more radical policies when he was environment minister.

None of this is a good sign for Carney as he tries to shift the image of the Liberal government away from Justin Trudeau’s strident ideology to a more pragmatic position.

Of course, it wasn’t a good first cabinet meeting all around with Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson saying housing prices don’t need to come down and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne saying there won’t be a budget this year. Add to that Carney imitating Donald Trump and once again opening a cabinet meeting by signing what looks like an executive order.

As the meeting began and media were still in the room, Carney signed a document instructing his cabinet to prioritize his promised middle-class tax cut. The document has no authority and is simply a bit of theatre designed to look like Trump’s executive order signings.

For a government that promised to be serious and focused on getting things done, Wednesday was not a good day.