As Canada is burning from wildfires, flooding from storms, and dealing with other extreme weather exacerbated by the climate crisis, I find myself asking again and again: why is this government doubling down on fossil fuels?
Well, it looks like we just got a very big clue as to a potential answer to that question: fossil fuel lobbying has exploded during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s time in office.
That’s according to a new report from Environmental Defence, which found that in this government’s first year — from May 2025 to April 2026 — the federal government was was lobbied by the fossil fuel industry “at least 1318 times.”
That’s the equivalent of five times per working day. (!!!)
On top of that, the environmental advocacy group says that Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson has met with the fossil fuel lobby 83 times in the government’s first year — all while they say the minister “has refused requests to meet with environmental experts.”
This isn’t the norm, either. It’s a massive uptick.
Hodgson’s predecessor, Jonathan Wilkinson, had his “highest level of exposure” to fossil fuel lobbyists in 2023 with 34 meetings. That’s a number Hodgson has more than doubled in his first year serving in office.
Carney had personally met with fossil fuel industry lobbyists at least 14 times during his first year as prime minister and over 20 times since being elected Liberal Party leader — while former prime minister Justin Trudeau took just two fossil fuel industry lobby meetings between 2023 and the end of January 2025.
For Julia Levin, the associate director for national climate at Environmental Defence, this incessant lobbying can’t be separated from the choices Carney’s government has made on the climate file.
“Since becoming Prime Minister, Mark Carney has taken a wrecking ball to the country’s climate progress. And it’s no wonder, given that fossil fuel lobbyists have been given unprecedented access to his government,” she said in a press release the group shared with me.
“PM Carney has given oil lobbyists nearly everything on their wishlist, including free rein to pollute without limits, dismantled environmental protections and taxpayer money for economically and environmentally risky projects like LNG, carbon capture and pipelines.”
Environmental Defence’s methodology is sound. They provide ongoing tracking of fossil fuel industry lobbying using the federal Registry of Lobbyists, publishing annual reports on what they find.
For this report, they broke down the meetings that 45 oil and gas companies held with the federal government between May 2025 and April 2026.
There are limitations to what they can follow, though — ones that aren’t their fault, and that, if anything, suggest there could be more meetings with oil and gas lobbyists that we don’t know about. The federal Registry of Lobbyists only publishes meetings initiated by lobbyists, which means any government-initiated meetings go untracked.
I reached out to both Carney and Hodgson’s offices to give them to opportunity to comment on the report’s findings, but they didn’t get back to me before publication (nor did their offices even deign to acknowledge my request).
Amid these incessant lobbying efforts, Carney’s government has all but abandoned the fight against the climate crisis.
“We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short term goal,” Carney said in a YouTube video published just before Canada Day.
As a result, he admitted, “our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were intended to be under the previous government’s plan.”
But if we look at the evidence, none of this is a necessity. It’s a choice — a nonsensical one at that.
Canada apparently has plenty of funds at its disposal when it comes to, for example, scrapping a proposed tax that would only impact the ultra-rich, or investing billions of taxpayer dollars into a Danielle Smith’s proposed new oil pipeline to the West Coast.
That’s despite the projections suggesting oil and gas demand might level off (and then start declining) two years before that pipeline is even finished construction.
In fact, Carney tells us we “can’t afford to restrain” the oil and gas industry — despite the economically devastating costs of the climate crisis, to which the oil and gas industry is our primary contributor.
“Climate-induced damages slow Canada’s economic growth in 2025 by $25 billion annually, which is equal to 50 per cent of projected GDP growth in 2025,” a report from the Canadian Climate Institute found.
That’s just one of the many “potentially catastrophic costs of climate change that they’ve recorded.
Then there’s that pesky little human and environmental element, too. Like the fact that the oil pipeline (and the linked port expansion) that Carney is pursuing will very likely drive the Southern Resident Killer Whale population to extinction. Climate change makes groceries more expensive, which means more people will go hungry.
Still, Carney said the Trudeau-era climate goals were “not sustainable over the long term.”
“It would have been too expensive for Canadians. Canadians who are already struggling with affordability,” he said.
The climate crisis is also fuelling more extreme weather, from deadly heatwaves, to community-destroying wildfires, to storms that flood homes and cast down destructive tornadoes.
Carney likes to tell Canadians he’s acting on the climate file through aggressively pursuing carbon capture and storage projects. The part he leaves out, though, is that there’s a reason this is the preferred “climate action” of oil and gas companies: not only is it inefficient at actually reducing emissions (while allowing companies to continue drilling), but about 73% of the carbon they capture is then injected into depleted oil wells, pushing out — and eventually, burning — even more oil that would have otherwise stayed in the ground.
All in all, it’s clear that Carney’s agenda is not fuelled by any concern for the environment. The part that makes it confusing, though, is that it also doesn’t appear to have a compelling economic argument.
Perhaps the news that the government is constantly being lobbied by fossil fuel companies, then, helps clarify otherwise muddy motivations.
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