By Gurneet Singh
In a world of unprecedented environmental destruction and a looming climate crisis, successful policies mean the difference between decisions that bring us closer or farther from a sustainable existence on the planet. After decades of inaction against climate change, the Canadian federal government united the provinces and territories in 2015 and developed the Pan- Canadian Framework (PCF), a historic intergovernmental policy brief to address environmental protection and set guidelines to achieve Canada’s Paris Agreement targets (Harrison, 2019).
The success of the PCF was short-lived. In a post-pandemic world with rising economic, social, and political tensions, climate policies were easy to blame. However, it came at the expense of key policies like the carbon pricing policy (CPP); a policy that supported emissions reductions and had strong support across governments and voters. Before the CPP failed, it thrived. How could a policy go from being the cornerstone of coordinated climate action to a divisive policy? What events, actors, and other conditions influenced the implementation of this policy and how did these factors affect its success? To answer these questions, this research paper employed McConnell’s (2010) “Policy Success Framework” as a methodological model to analyze Canada’s CPP.
To grasp the ways in which success and failure can manifest, McConnell (2010) divides policy into three dimensions – process, programs, and politics – which he refers to as the “Three Strands of Policy”. McConnell (2010) does not view the outcomes of each dimension as a binary rhetoric of success or failure. Instead, he offers a fivefold typology which distinguishes between different degrees of success. The spectrum ranges from success, resilient success, conflicted success, precarious success, and ends at failure (McConnell, 2010). Figure 1 summarizes the dimensions and the fivefold typology. To analyze the CPP, I gathered information on events and decisions made by governments and policymakers throughout its planning and implementation stages and organized the findings into four time periods as listed in Figure 2. This helped to organize the information and highlight how the outcomes of a policy and its performance can shift throughout time.
The CPP shifted across varying degrees of success and failure from 2015 to 2025 and beyond. The policy started out as a success, enhancing Justin Trudeau’s electoral prospects at a time when climate change was considered a high priority for Canadians. The policy did not change significantly over the years, but its performance and public acceptability was dependent on the prevailing concern for voters. Following a series of events that affected the global community, climate change and the environment became secondary to economic concerns. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the Ukraine-Russia war and now dealing with the fallout of decisions of the Trump administration, the cost of living has skyrocketed and economies are struggling. The turning point was arguably the rise in oil prices following the Ukraine-Russia war, which opposing political parties like the Conservative Party of Canada, used to their advantage to construct a narrative that Trudeau’s climate policies were making life in Canada unaffordable.
The findings of this research indicate that the CPP was a winner that lost in the end because it faced significant opposition. Further research would be needed to determine whether the opposition was organic or manufactured specifically to destabilize Trudeau’s government. It seems that when the economy is in peril, the environment is the first to be sacrificed. To create more resilient environmental policies, they must be designed to withstand economic shocks; otherwise, they will never survive long enough to generate their intended benefits. Figure 2 shows the overview of the findings of this research.