LILLEY: While Carney locked in net-zero zealotry, Poilievre pushes prosperity

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Ensuring Canada’s economy remains resilient in the face of tariffs and other economic threats from Donald Trump requires much more than just counter-tariffs. That’s why the announcement by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in Sudbury on Wednesday was so important.

Poilievre said that if the Conservatives were elected, his government would approve all permits for the Ring of Fire within six months and commit $1 billion for road construction to connect that area of Northern Ontario to the province’s road system.

“Unlocking the Ring of Fire will be life-changing for Northern Ontario towns and First Nation communities, galvanized by thousands of paycheques and modern infrastructure,” Poilievre said Wednesday.

The Ring of Fire is a massive deposit of minerals — such as gold, platinum, chromite, nickel, copper, and zinc — located about 400 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. The area has been talked about as a site of development for years but for a variety of reasons, it hasn’t happened.

In the last several years, one of the factors slowing things down has been endless studies by the federal government which led Ontario Premier Doug Ford to issue this message to Prime Minister Mark Carney just after he took the job.

“It’s never been more important to build big things here in Ontario and across our country, including and especially the Ring of Fire. To do so, the federal government needs to get out of our way,” Ford said while calling for support for nation-building projects.

Relations between Ford and the federal government on this file have been tense to say the least. At times the Liberals in Ottawa have stood in Ford’s way as he has tried to work with First Nations communities to get this project going, at other times they have simply dragged their feet.

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Two of the biggest obstacles on this file, Jonathan Wilkinson and Steven Guilbeault, are now part of Mark Carney’s new cabinet. Carney, for all his talk of wanting to build national infrastructure projects has spent the last several years pushing the very opposite.

Carney’s view is very much like Trudeau’s — keep it in the ground. Though, that’s not how Carney operated when he was the chair of Brookfield Asset Management.

While Carney opposed pipelines and natural resource project in Canada, he led a firm that joined a consortium to spend (US)$20.7 billion to acquire a 49% stake in a pipeline network belonging to Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. in the United Arab Emirates. His company also took control of more than 2,000 kilometres of gas pipelines in Brazil.

All the while, Carney opposed the construction of pipelines here in Canada, and recently — during the Liberal leadership race — promised Quebec a veto on any future proposed pipelines.

How do you build an economy in a natural resource rich country like Canada while opposing natural resource projects?

There are some who seem to think that because Carney is an economist, because he ran the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, that he must be some kind of expert and must be listened to. Believe me, there are plenty of people who are smart, who are educated, who are experts and who have horrible ideas.

Just ask yourself if you’d like to be governed by the faculty of your local college or university to see what I mean.

Carney is an evangelist for the net-zero green ideology. He has spent the last decade pushing this concept, including advocating that banks should not be providing loans or financing to companies engaged in emissions-emitting industries.

Does that sound like the man who will do what is required to boost Canada’s economy in the face of Trump’s tariffs and other economic threats, or someone who will bring us more of the same green zealotry that has brought us a decade of slow growth compared to our peers?

Carney simply isn’t the man Canada needs at the moment.