Trudeau says he’s concerned about what a Trump win would mean for climate action

Asked by the CBC’s Rosemary Barton this week about the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially fell back on the fact that every American administration (Trudeau has now worked with three presidents) brings challenges for Canada.

The Liberal government, he said, was able to work through some “very difficult problems” when Trump was president from 2016 and 2020, including his threat to “rip up” the North American Free Trade Agreement and “a desire to move backwards on climate change” that “was a menace not just to Canada but to the world.”

But Trudeau then allowed himself to cast forward — and acknowledged that he could see cause for concern. 

“Yes, there’s a concern — particularly around the environment, at a time where it’s so important to move forward on protecting and building an economy of the future where energy workers, miners, forestry workers across this country — and manufacturing across this country — continues to be successful as we move towards lower emissions,” he said.

“A Trump presidency that goes back on the fight against climate change would slow down the world’s progress in ways that are concerning to me.”

During Trump’s four years in the White House, Trudeau’s Liberals tended to be highly selective in their public comments about what the American president was saying, doing and tweeting — presumably in the hope of avoiding conflict with the leader of Canada’s largest trading partner and most important ally.

A Canadian prime minister commenting on the potential ramifications of a presidential election also risks being accused of undiplomatically wading into American domestic affairs. When Trump declared his intention to run again last November, Canadian officials told CBC News that they intended to withhold comment.

But it’s also impossible to deny that next year’s vote in the United States could have significant global ramifications — not least for the fight against climate change.

When Trump quit Paris

The Trudeau government carefully chose its spots to comment on presidential policy between 2016 and 2020. One of those spots was international climate action.

When Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Trudeau said he was “deeply disappointed” by the decision. Days later, the Liberals marked World Environment Day with renewed vigour.

“If the U.S. administration is going to step back on climate action, Canada is going to step up and do even more,” said Catherine McKenna, federal environment minister at the time.

The Liberals also pledged to work with American governors and mayors on actions to reduce greenhouse emissions. (Even before the United States officially left the Paris agreement, Canada had started pursuing separate climate discussions with the European Union and China.)

Perhaps no country can claim that its emissions are a purely domestic matter. That’s particularly true for a country with the practical size and potential influence of the United States.

Trump has not sounded any more interested in doing something about climate change since leaving the White House. 

He has erroneously downplayed the threat posed by a shifting climate and has said he would cancel an American commitment to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change. Officials associated with his campaign told the Financial Times in November that he would seek to roll back investments in clean energy and repeal regulations aimed at reducing emissions.

A former Trump adviser told the Times it was “almost guaranteed” that Trump would withdraw from the Paris accord again. And an American retreat could give other countries an excuse to do likewise — or at least to do less.

The shadow cast on climate talks

So it’s no surprise that the prospect of Trump’s return to power cast a pall over the COP climate conference in Dubai earlier this month.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘In the U.S., we may not get it as good as we have it now. So let’s agree to as much as we can with this administration, because who knows next year in which situation we’ll find ourselves,'” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told the Washington Post. “A lot of people are very aware and sensitive to that.”

A Trump victory would not necessarily mean defeat in the fight against climate change. At least some of the international momentum created in recent years — particularly by the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which the U.S. Congress passed last year — might be hard for even the president of the United States to completely stall or reverse.

Investments are being made, private capital is moving, consumers are making choices. Another retreat by the United States could create another opportunity for China to take the lead on climate action.

But for the sake of reducing global emissions as quickly as possible, every step forward or backward matters.