Montreal/CMEDIA: Former environment minister Catherine McKenna reportedly accuses the leaders of Canada’s oil industry in putting both the economy and environment at risk.
Canada’s official greenhouse gas inventory published last week showed that in 2024, oil and gas production was the only sector in the country to have increased its greenhouse gas emissions.
“In Canada, we expect Canadians expect everyone to step up and do their parts. But instead, we have oil and gas, which is largely foreign-owned, largely U.S.-owned, who aren’t doing their part. All they’re doing is increasing our emissions and demanding subsidies,” McKenna said in an interview while at Montreal’s climate summit last week.
She adds that oil companies are “demanding that Canadian taxpayers pay the bill for cleaning up the pollution they cause and building pipelines they won’t risk their own money on.”
The Montreal Climate Summit is an annual gathering of political, business and union leaders as well as philanthropic and environmental organizations to discuss the city’s climate transition.
Having served as environment minister from 2015 to 2021, McKenna has a long list of grievances against the heads of these companies and says they have been profiting from Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine and now the war in Iran.
“But what do they do with those profits? They give them back to fat cat CEOs and then they go give them back to their shareholders, largely Americans who support Donald Trump,” she said.
An analysis published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said that Canadian companies in the oil industry are bringing in an extra $170 million in profits every day because of the war in Iran, which has pushed global oil prices up by more than 50 percent.
According to Canada’s official greenhouse gas inventory, oil sands production has increased by more than 900 percent in the country since 1990.
Increasing gas and oil production year after year, stresses McKenna is not the direction the rest of the world is taking.
“From an environmental perspective it makes no sense — and economically, even less,” she said. “Energy shocks are moving countries everywhere even faster toward renewable energy which is cheaper, cleaner,” she said.
Energy shocks refer to sudden changes in prices, causing major disruptions, like wars.
Renewable energy accounted for 85.6 percent of the total expansion in global electricity capacity in 2025, a recent report published by the International Renewable Energy Agency shows.
McKenna says she’s worried for Canada.
“How about get people off fossil fuels, get them into EVs,” she said. “Why are we still heating our homes with oil and gas?…We really have to move forward on these solutions. That isn’t so much about affordability as it is about Canada’s economic competitiveness now and into the future,” she said. “And of course it’s also better for kids.”
Meanwhile, McKenna says, oil and gas being the leading cause of climate change and accuses major companies of participating in greenwashing efforts and spreading disinformation to keep up business as usual.
Three researchers from the University of Ottawa published a study in the Energy Research & Social Science scientific journal in June 2024 on how the New Pathways Alliance was misleading the public with its environmental claims.
The New Pathways Alliance, now known as the Oil Sands Alliance, is a consortium comprising Canadian Natural Resources, Suncor, Cenovus, Imperial Oil and ConocoPhillips.
For years, this alliance has been promoting the Pathways’ project, which aims to make oil sands production “carbon neutral” by 2050 through carbon capture and storage.
