By Don Newman

December 1, 2025

They were among the few long faces at last Saturday evening’s annual Press Gallery Dinner. Stephen Guilbeault looked as though he had just lost his best friend. Green Party Elizabeth May looked as though she would break into tears.

Guilbeault had resigned two days earlier from his job as heritage minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Carney over the deal Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith that could create an Oil Sands pipeline to the Northwest coast of British Columbia.

May — who had just days earlier written a piece for Policy on why she had seen fit to vote for Carney’s budget — was telling anyone who asked that her heart was broken.

Guilbeault may have not have been environment minister in the Carney cabinet, but he remains the most activist federal environment minister in history, having transitioned in 2019 from a background as co-founder of Equiterre and climate change co-ordinator for Greenpeace International to elected Liberal politics.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first appointed him minister of heritage before making him minister of environment and climate change in 2021. Guilbeault endorsed Carney to succeed Trudeau and was kept on in the cabinet, though moved back to heritage.

May is the lone Green MP in the Commons. In this minority Parliament, where the Liberals are three votes short of a majority, her last-minute decision to support the government in the November 17th budget confidence vote was one reason the government survived.

If it had not, Mark Carney would not have been free to sign a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith last week on pipeline development because he would have been campaigning to keep his job.

May, who supported the government after being publicly assured that the Liberals would continue to pursue their Greenhouse Gas emission targets, now says her vote was a “mistake”. And Guilbeault says policies he has championed, campaigned for and implemented are imperilled.

This is the first round in what will be a continuing tug-of-war going forward in Carney’s Liberal government.

Guilbeault is not the only Liberal MP concerned about the pipeline agreement. Many of the 20 members of the British Columbia Liberal caucus have their concerns, both about the environment and the politics of a potential west-coast pipeline opposed by B.C. Premier David Eby and his New Democratic Party government. The same is true of Liberal members from other provinces, particularly in environmentally sensitive Quebec.

The contrast between May and Guilbeault on the one hand and a beaming Smith in Calgary last Thursday telegraphs a twist in post-Trudeau federal politics: so far, the political casualties of Mark Carney’s choices seem to be predominantly on the left.

This is the first round in what will be a continuing tug-of-war going forward in Carney’s Liberal government. It will be a fight between many of the MPs who came into politics with Justin Trudeau and bought into his left-of-centre agenda, which moved farther leftward  after the supply and confidence agreement Trudeau reached with Jagmeet Singh and the New Democrats.

On the other side, Carney and the Liberals who accept his argument that we live in a new era, a time when the United States can no longer be relied on for either economic or defence support and protection, and when Canada will have to chart our own way developing new markets and military capabilities. All of that will be expensive. The deficit in the recent federal budget is comparable to those during pandemic years.

As major infrastructure and energy projects are approved, environmentalists will not be happy. Social programs will be strained and their advocates will complain. Not only will a “new” Canada take money to build, it will take time.

The minority Carney government will face challenges finding the votes to pass critical confidence legislation. In the recent vote on the budget, enough New Democrats abstained to make sure the government did not fall. After next March, when the party has a new leader, abstaining on social programs or the environment may not be an option.

So far, Carney’s statement that the world has changed and Canada has to change with it has not been seriously challenged. But as time passes, the costs mount and pain is felt, Steven Guilbeault’s and Elizabeth May’s won’t be the only long faces.

Carney and his “change” Liberals will have to hold their ground, steel their nerves and find support for an agenda that will change Canada.

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.