EXCLUSIVE: Carney’s lone Green promise could cost trillions — or more than all Tory spending combined

While Liberals blast the Conservatives for their proposed spending, one un-costed Carney initiative alone could make all Tory promises look like pocket change in comparison.

That’s because Liberal leader Mark Carney’s pledge to replace fossil fuels in government buildings could cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, far surpassing any proposed opposition spending plans.

Carney, a former central banker and leading Liberal climate advisor — even before he was ‘selected’ prime minister —has championed the decarbonization of government infrastructure as a cornerstone of his environmental vision. 

However, even the most conservative estimates suggest that achieving his goal would require a staggering investment at a time when the Canadian economy is already facing a shock from looming US tariffs.

The problem is that nobody knows exactly how much it would cost.

The Canadian Gas Association (CGA) in 2019 calculated that replacing just half of Canada’s fossil fuel-generated energy with renewable electricity could cost as much as $1.4 trillion over 30 years. Global estimates are on the order of USD$140 trillion. 

Given that government buildings represent a significant portion of national energy consumption, the price tag for full decarbonization could soar even higher.

Comparisons to Canada’s southern neighbour in the US provide additional context. 

In the US, state and local governments own one-sixth of all building space — some six million square meters or 20 million square feet. A similar proportion in Canada would mean a vast government real estate portfolio requiring complete electrification, as per Carney.

The CGA’s figures suggest that fully electrifying Canada’s government infrastructure alone could push costs well beyond the trillion-dollar mark — dwarfing any current government spending proposal.

Despite the enormous financial commitment, concrete cost estimates remain elusive. Both federal and provincial governments have yet to release full projections on how much taxpayers would have to pay to transition all public buildings to so-called ‘clean’ energy.

The scale of the challenge is daunting. The federal government manages thousands of buildings across Canada, including:

• Department of National Defence: 14,230 buildings (8 million+ square metres)

• Public Services and Procurement Canada: 6.73 million square metres of space

• Royal Canadian Mounted Police: 3,034 buildings

This does not include provincial, municipal, and educational facilities, which form the bulk of government-owned real estate. More than half of these properties are schools and colleges, meaning the decarbonization effort would need to reach deep into local communities, impacting both public budgets and utility costs.

It amounts to a price tag larger than Canada’s annual GDP.

For context, $1.4 trillion is nearly half of Canada’s total GDP in a single year. It also eclipses the estimated $100 billion per year that the federal government says is needed for all climate spending — let alone just one initiative.

Meanwhile, the Trudeau government has already committed billions to decarbonizing the buildings sector, including $600 million for the Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Program (2022-2029) and $1 billion in additional targeted investments in its 2024 budget.

That doesn’t include the damage inflicted from more than half a decade of carbon taxes. But those figures pale in comparison to the projected cost of a full-scale transition.

Carney has frequently warned against reckless government spending and has framed himself as a champion of “responsible economic stewardship.” 

However, the sheer cost of decarbonizing government buildings raises questions about whether he can maintain his fiscal credibility while backing a plan that could outstrip the combined costs of every major Conservative election promise.

And in fact, Carney was a major booster of government retrofits as co-chair of his beloved Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a global ‘climate bank’ that went into restructuring earlier last December.

Meanwhile, the economic ripple effects of this policy are already being felt both in Canada and the US, notwithstanding the latter’s expected tariffs. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently warned that Trump’s new tariffs on China could have a “not trivial” impact on clean energy supply chains —something that could further drive up costs for Carney’s plan given that solar panels and the like are mostly made in countries like China.

“Again, Mark Carney’s climate plan is an exercise in misdirection — a rhetorical sleight of hand to convince Canadians that he’ll lighten the burden on taxpayers and shift away from the Trudeau government’s overzealous climate policies of the past decade,” wrote Kenneth Green, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute. 

“But scratch the surface of the Carney plan and you’ll see climate policies that will hit Canadian consumers harder, with likely higher prices for goods and services.”