The Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute has named Steven Guilbeault, federal minister of environment and climate change, its 2023 policymaker of the year. “Ruthless, reckless and damaging,” the cover of the latest issue of MLI’s Inside Policy magazine calls him, announcing its choice.

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Matthew Lau: Steven Guilbeault, 'policymaker of the year,' is killing economic growth Back to video

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Standing out for reckless and damaging policy-making is a real achievement in a government now famous for policy disasters. Its economic policy has created crises of unaffordability and stagnation; its foreign policy was recently praised by terror group Hamas; and its social policy has descended into a parody of wokeness, with international headlines mocking Ottawa for providing free feminine hygiene products in men’s washrooms on Parliament Hill and instructing all federally regulated workplaces to do the same — since providing them only to women would not be equitable.

When it comes to the Liberals’ economic and environmental policy disasters, Guilbeault is a key architect. The Soviet-style electric vehicle mandate proclaimed two weeks ago is but the latest example. The Liberals are mandating that 20 per cent of new light-duty vehicles sold must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2026. In this year’s third quarter only 13 per cent were — so ground needs to be made up. And then the requirement rises to 60 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035, with steep penalties for producers that miss these targets.

Forced conversion is a calamity for industry, consumers, and taxpayers. Electric vehicles cost consumers $14,000 more, on average, than gas-powered cars — even after federal government subsidies of up to $5,000 per vehicle plus provincial subsidies that vary by province but are as high as $7,000 in Quebec. Hopes that electric vehicles may reach financial parity with gas-fuelled ones are fraught with uncertainty, as prices are largely driven by the costs of a wide range of minerals mined mainly in foreign countries.

As Manhattan Institute scholar Mark P. Mills detailed in a study last year, expanding mineral extraction to meet government-inflated demand cancels out much of electric vehicles’ supposed environmental benefits. For the vast majority of consumers, according to Mills, even with government subsidies it’s not clear “when, if ever, EVs will reach parity in cost and fuelling convenience” and because of the upstream emissions in manufacturing, “no one knows how much, if at all, CO2 emissions will decline as EV use rises.” It’s even possible, Mills concludes, that large-scale EV adoption may cause emissions to rise.

In addition to fighting cars and drivers, Guilbeault spent 2023 assaulting the oil and gas sector with what the MLI’s Heather Exner-Pirot calls “sector-destroying policies.” On top of the carbon tax, clean fuel regulations came into effect in July, significantly inflating fuel costs and disproportionately impacting poor Canadians. In August, Guilbeault introduced draft clean electricity regulations that will “necessarily take large swaths of Canada’s existing generation capacity off-line,” Exner-Pirot writes. Then in December, at COP28, Guilbeault announced an emissions cap targeting Canadian oil and gas. The carbon tax already covers all sectors; singling out one for special regulation is punitive and destructive.

The march to decarbonize Canada, apparently in the most haphazard manner possible, is causing profound economic harm. The federal government’s own estimates suggest that relative to a “current measures” baseline, net-zero policies would wipe out 20 to 40 per cent of the growth from 2022 to 2050 in real per capita GDP. And that assumes baseline growth of 21.1 per cent, which may well be optimistic. Canada’s real GDP per capita actually shrank in each of the last five quarters.

While impoverishing Canadians to save the planet, Guilbeault has not himself set a good low-carbon example or lived especially austerely. In August, he and a seven-person delegation took a four-day trip to Beijing for a two-day climate conference, billing taxpayers for flight and lodging costs of $140,000, with additional expense claims pending. Juxtapose this with his November announcement that the government would fight a Federal Court ruling striking down its classification of all plastic manufactured items as “toxic” — the basis for its ban on single-use plastics. So Guilbeault and company can take a $140,000-trip on our dime, but we are not allowed to drink from plastic straws.

Does Guilbeault really believe that his bans on plastics and gas-powered cars and all the rest of his meddling actually helps Canadians? If so, he’s fooling himself. If not, he’s trying to fool the rest of us. Either way, he really is damaging, reckless and the worst policymaker of 2023.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.

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