Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages Steven Guilbeault speaks to reporters ahead of a Liberal Caucus party meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025. Photo by: Spencer Colby / The Canadian Press
Two days before Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled his controversial agreement with Alberta that could see a new oil pipeline built, then-cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault demanded a briefing with the Prime Minister’s Office.
In Guilbeault’s first English media interview since his resignation Thursday, he told Canada’s National Observer that until that briefing, he was under the impression the memorandum of understanding (MOU) would involve fixing Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing market, moving forward on the Pathways Alliance carbon capture mega project and a conversation about a potential new pipeline.
The agreement, however, goes much further, proposing to slash-and-burn a series of climate policies that include clean electricity regulations, the oil and gas emissions cap and the oil tanker moratorium. It also includes a dramatic reversal in policy that would allow carbon capture tax credits to be used for enhanced oil recovery (pumping more oil out of the ground using captured carbon dioxide) — despite that being explicitly excluded in the federal budget published just weeks ago.
“I was shocked and outraged,” Guilbeault said of all the changes. “I told them that to me, this was unacceptable, and this is not something I could support.”
Guilbeault spoke to Carney for about an hour Tuesday evening, as first reported by The Toronto Star. He told Carney the actions outlined in the MOU would upend the country’s emissions reductions. Without clean electricity regulations, the industrial carbon price would need to skyrocket to $400 per tonne to achieve equivalent reductions, according to Guilbeault, referring to internal Environment and Climate Change Canada’s forecasts that haven’t been publicly released.
“I think [Carney] would dispute those numbers, saying that when he was at Brookfield they did some deals to retire coal-fired plants in Indonesia and it was much cheaper than that. Maybe, but this is the analysis we have,” Guilbeault said.
“I told him I could not support the agreement the way it was. I said if there were changes that could be made, I was happy to look at them. And he said, ‘Okay, I'd really like you to stay, so let's try to see if we can fix this.’”
In Steven Guilbeault’s first English-media interview since resigning over the pipeline MOU with Alberta , the former cabinet minister said the government isn’t being honest with the public and is betraying its commitments.
Officials within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) tried to tweak the MOU language, but by Wednesday night Guilbeault was told Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wouldn’t budge.
“When the agreement came out someone texted me saying, ‘The only thing missing from the agreement is Pierre Poilievre's signature,’ and I went yeah, I think that sums it up,” he said.
Within hours of the agreement being unveiled, Guilbeault told Carney that he would resign.
“He tried to convince me to stay and be part of the follow-up committee with the MOU,” Guilbeault said. “At one point I said, ‘Sorry prime minister, I'm no longer your man. I can't help you move this agenda forward. You'll need to find someone else.’”
Pushed too far
Guilbeault knew the oil and gas cap was likely on its way out, especially after its fate was signalled in the federal budget. But carving out an exemption for Alberta on clean electricity regulations and the oil tanker ban on BC’s coast, while allowing government funds earmarked for carbon capture to be used to help companies extract even more oil, were three daggers to the heart of the country’s climate efforts he couldn’t live with.
The enhanced oil recovery tax credit was especially egregious to Guilbeault — particularly because of promises that had just been made to help pass Carney’s budget.
The budget “explicitly mentioned that we're excluding enhanced oil recovery from the tax credit,” Guilbeault said — a demand from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May that Guilbeault had communicated to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne as her red line. “Then Elizabeth votes for us with the budget, and then, we turn around two weeks later, barely, and we include this in the MOU with Alberta.
“I told that to the PMO and said, ‘This is unacceptable, I gave my word to Elizabeth, we gave our word as a party to Elizabeth, and we're betraying our word to her.’”
(From page 348 of Budget 2025 published Nov. 4, 2025)(From the MOU signed between Canada and Alberta published Nov. 27, 2025)
Guilbeault said he plans to join the Liberals’ environmental caucus where he will have more freedom to publicly disagree with the government’s decisions — saying he’ll be a “thorn in their sides from time to time.”
His first order of business now that he’s no longer in cabinet is being honest with Canadians — a standard Carney’s government is not currently living up to, he said.
“We have abandoned 2030 [climate targets]; there's no way we can achieve that,” he said, taking aim at former cabinet colleagues, like Environment and Climate Change and Nature Minister Julie Dabrusin, who claims Canada is committed to its targets and recently refused to say whether a new oil pipeline increases or decreases emissions. “I think it lacks the honesty that Canadians deserve on this issue. It's disingenuous.”
‘Not all lost’
As a climate activist turned politician, Guilbeault’s time in office has always been defined by living with compromise. In exchange for choosing to run with a party that bought and built the Trans Mountain expansion project — something he always publicly condemned — he found his hands on the levers of power as the country’s environment and climate change minister from 2021 to 2025.
Approving the Bay du Nord offshore oil project, and carving out exemptions to the consumer carbon price for home heating oil are two of the compromises he found hard to make, but on the other hand, his four years steering the country’s climate efforts saw him introduce a series of emission-reduction policies that are now, piece by piece, being dismantled.
To his supporters, compromises are the cost of politics, and having a committed environmentalist in the minister role pushing for change in a party that supported the country’s fossil fuel sector was a worthwhile tradeoff. To his critics, Guilbeault offered a green sheen to the Liberals. For many to the left of the Liberals, he was greenwashing the party; for many on the right — and to large parts of provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan — he was a radical, hellbent on destroying the country by pursuing decarbonization.
But on the whole, he felt the compromises were worth it — until Thursday.
“I think fundamentally we showed that we can reduce our emissions in Canada,” he said.
Thursday’s MOU represents a major set-back, but “not all is lost,” he said. “I will work with my colleagues to try to save everything we can, but I'll do this as an MP.”
As an MP and part of the Liberals’ environmental caucus, Guilbeault feels he can speak more openly, criticize the party and steer it in a positive direction from a more adversarial point of view.
“I think some people in PMO will say, ‘Geez, we were much better off having him inside than outside cabinet.”
