All of those changes have been hailed by industry stakeholders. The government also has signalled it intends to introduce other measures to help lower emissions — like a national electricity strategy, despite the fact that it will deploy natural gas plants — and the promise to offer green retrofits for one million households.

The government still has not produced modelling to show how those changes would affect Canada’s emissions.

The government did publish a progress report in December, which is required under the government’s Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. It showed Canada’s best-case scenario model had the country achieving only a 28 per cent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels in 2030.

Under the Paris climate agreement, Canada committed to reducing its emissions by 40 to 45 per cent from the 2005 level by 2030. Carney said earlier this month Canada is still committed to that target but hasn’t said how it can achieve it.

But the best-case scenario model assumed industrial carbon pricing would reach $170 a tonne by 2030. Earlier this month, the Carney government signed an agreement with Alberta to set the headline price at $115 by 2030 — a timeline which will also apply across all provinces and territories.

A study in February by the Canadian Climate Institute suggested Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets — the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment and the long-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

“There’s no evidence that we’ve been presented with … with the scale of gutting of climate ambition … that there’s any pathway to meet near-term or long-term emission reduction commitments,” said Tim Gray, the executive director of Environmental Defence.

He said Dabrusin’s testimony at Thursday’s committee hearing amounted to her defending “the indefensible.”

“I think it’s a reasonable thing for the public to ask for evidence of that being the case, if the government is going to insist upon saying that, in fact, we have it wrong,” he said. “You know, obviously we’re open to that, but there’s been no evidence presented about why gutting all of this legislation would not have a negative impact in the way that we’re describing.”

Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said the idea behind the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act — which her organization helped to push forward — was to get federal departments to conduct ongoing accounting to help create policy.

“The (environment) minister and the prime minister keep saying that we’re still committed to those targets, but meanwhile their actions and their policy decisions are doing the exact contrary,” Brouillette said.

“I think this also speaks to the highly centralized way in which decision-making is happening right now. Sometimes, we’re hearing (decisions are being made) without involvement of key departments. So that also makes it harder.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 30, 2026.

Nick Murray, The Canadian Press