Prime Minister Mark Carney has reaffirmed his government will continue to reduce emissions while emphasizing investor confidence in the aftermath of the federal budget unveiling.At an Ottawa press conference on Wednesday, Carney addressed concerns about the industrial carbon tax, which some critics fear could be weakened through consultations with the provinces and territories.He emphasized that the budget includes measures to strengthen both the industrial carbon tax and the federal backstop.“Provinces have different carbon tax approaches, and in some cases, their markets are very liberal with credits,” Carney said.“There’s a big gap between the effective carbon tax and the backstop price. There are ways to work that out, and we believe in cooperative federalism — we don’t impose policies unilaterally. We work with the provinces in order to tighten the system.”Carney was also questioned regarding a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), discussed during his election campaign but notably absent from the budget.He said Ottawa was reviewing the idea but emphasized that Canada’s industrial carbon tax provides the country with access to the global market in places such as the European Union where similar measures have been implemented.“There's a lot of reasons why it's important to have an industrial carbon tax, but one of the reasons why it's important is for market access,” he said.“If we've taken one lesson from the experience of this year, it's that we need to diversify our markets abroad. It's an important component.”.UPDATED: Liberals unveil $78B deficit in fall budget.On an economic front, Carney addressed concerns about Canada’s attractiveness to investors, especially with regard to recent news of investors heading south to the US, citing that recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) projections rank Canada as the second-fastest-growing G7 economy going forward.“It's not growing under that forecast at a rate that we're satisfied with, or I think Canadians would be satisfied with,” he stated, adding that taxes need to be more competitive to attract economic interest.“If you're actually investing in the future, the rate is much lower in Canada than it is in the United States, and in this budget, we made it lower still,” Carney said.“The super productivity deduction is one of the major initiatives which probably hasn't had the attention that it should... You need greater certainty about the speed with which regulatory decisions are going to be taken.”Carney also highlighted efforts to try to accelerate regulatory approvals and large infrastructure projects, from hospitals and housing to critical minerals development.He believes the $2 billion sovereign fund for critical minerals mentioned in the budget positions Canada on par with similar initiatives in the US and Australia, attracting international investors from Asia, Europe, and the Arab states.“There is tremendous interest internationally in what's going on in Canada,” Carney said.“Major investors are very interested in coming here. Investors in the Gulf. Same thing with investors in Europe. That's on top of the fact that we have more than $2 trillion of institutional capital in this country and the pension funds who make their own decisions on how they're going to invest, but we're creating a better investment environment for them.”
