At a moment of global economic uncertainty, and cost-of-living still a major topic on people’s minds, there’s a growing concern about the future of Canada’s climate policies.
Two new studies examined how people perceive federal climate policies and came to remarkably similar conclusions. Despite polling consistently showing that Canadians want climate action, they remain unconvinced that the current suite of policies will help meet our climate goals while also creating more affordable energy options.
Both studies found that there are critical factors beyond the affordability narrative that play a role in people’s support for climate policy.
Re.Climate’s resource and training coordinator Emma Bider sat down with the three researchers to hear more about their findings and unpack some of the nuances around support for climate policies. Dr. Louise Comeau is a senior advisor at Re.Climate. Aaron Hoyle is a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria in the school of public administration. Dr. Katya Rhodes is an association professor at the school of public administration at the University of Victoria.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Unpacking Policy Support
Emma Bider: Louise, the research that has been done for Re.Climate has focused on federal electrification climate policies, and technologies like EVs and heat pumps. You have also looked at other climate polices through your other research projects and your broader policy advisory work. And Aaron, in your paper with Katya you looked at a range of consumer and industry-facing policies like the emissions cap. My first question is: Did you see different levels of support depending on the type of policy, and why?
Louise Comeau: Yes. Anything that was consumer facing, like the consumer carbon price, for example, was less supported than policies that make big polluters pay. Industrial polluter pricing was more than supported.
Aaron Hoyle: Similarly, the consumer carbon price and the zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate faced high levels of opposition, whereas the four other regulatory policies [the low-carbon fuel standard, electric building equipment mandate, oil and gas GHG emissions cap and emissions trading system for buildings and transport] that we asked people about all received more support than opposition.
I think for us what was particularly noteworthy was around that ZEV mandate. Despite that being a regulatory measure, it encountered opposition levels comparable to the carbon price. And this challenges the conventional assumption in our field, which is that regulations inherently face less public resistance than pricing instruments.
EB: In both cases, your research highlights that it is not just costs that matter to people. So, what matters most to people about federal climate policies?
AH: Perceptions of dollar cost certainly do matter, but our research identifies that there are important psychological drivers that are also dominant factors in shaping policy support. In particular, we found that people’s perceptions around the fairness of a policy’s impacts on different social groups was really important. Looking at what shapes these judgments, we found that perceptions of how policies would affect future generations, low income households and rural communities were particularly influential.
There’s an effectiveness dimension to this as well. People want evidence that policies will actually achieve their environmental goals, and so when a policy is perceived as ineffective, the constraints imposed on people feel unjustified, and that, in turn, affects fairness perceptions.
LC: The fairness aspect was there, particularly around the question of “is this affordable to me?” “Do I have access to it?” But people are also sorting through the information they are receiving, whether it’s on social media or from installers. In both cases, they might be receiving misinformation or disinformation, you know, maybe from the dealership they go to and they’re trying to have a conversation about EVs and the salesperson is distracting them with all sorts of information about why EVs don’t work and are unreliable. And the same thing is happening when a heat pump installer comes to the house.
So there are concerns, I think, about just how comfortable the professionals are in engaging with these new technologies, and that’s then being passed on to a potential purchaser or user.
EB: I’m sure you’ve all seen the news out of the U.S. about Trump’s plan to get rid of Energy Star, which I think will probably just make it even more difficult to parse out what’s reliable, effective and efficient.
Katya Rhodes: You know, this isn’t only a problem in Canada or North America. We see this also in the European Union, where you hear about the ZEV mandate as a ban on fossil fuel vehicles, even when there’s no discussion about the secondary market, or plug-in hybrid vehicles.
But there is good news about heat pumps. Another student in our group is about to submit an article on heat pump preferences. And we found that while there are those groups that are super enthusiastic, and then those who are big furnace advocates, both are small groups. There is a neutral group, which is almost 50 per cent of all Canadian homeowners who can be influenced either way. So this group is where those discussions around installation hassles, reliability issues have to happen in a more targeted, non-biased manner.
LC: Yes, excellent point. One thing we got from the focus groups was that, often people are in the market for a heat pump when their furnace has broken. It’s actually an emergency, so that moment is our opportunity to intervene and give them the choice to go for a heat pump. But often what I heard is that they just couldn’t. Heat pumps weren’t available, the incentives weren’t helpful to them, it was an emergency so the finances weren’t going to work out.
What I heard in the focus groups was an awful lot of guilt. People felt they were making choices that were less optimal for the environment because they had no choice. And a large proportion of our sample when we did the survey felt they had no choice. So this question of agency is not just a psychological one. There actually are physical barriers. And I don’t feel that a lot of the work we do acknowledges that enough.
Using a Fairness Lens
EB: If fairness is important in driving public support, then what are your thoughts on how policies can be designed and communicated to feel fair to the public?
AH: I think policy mechanisms should first visibly address impacts on those groups we know influence fairness judgements. Our studies show that expected impacts on low-income households and rural communities were the strongest predictors of perceived fairness. And I think that people have pretty good intuitions, you know, this is reflected in reality, people aren’t just making that up. So I think first, policy design should include specific provisions that benefit these communities in particular. In tandem, communication should highlight this.
The other point I’ll add is that communications strategies can try to address this psychological distance factor we’ve identified. What I mean is that regulations that target household technologies are going to be perceived differently than abstract industry measures. Both are necessary. So when policies affect daily choices that people are making right now, the communication should at least try to emphasize how these policies enhance rather than constrain agency, while also addressing practical concerns about accessibility and affordability.
LC: I see this also as a particularly gendered issue to some degree. Women tend to be lower-income generally speaking, and have greater concern for other groups in society like lower-income groups. We also saw that women have less confidence around these technologies like heat pumps and EVs. Men were more interested in the tech. So this fairness dimension does have these other components that I think we need to be more sensitive to. We need policies on energy poverty that need to be well designed and well implemented.
KR: I do think it’s also important to remember that while there are material impacts of fairness, you know people who are really suffering and can’t afford an EV, but there are also discursive elements that are coming from people who think that a certain policy is unfair but it actually doesn’t negatively affect them. They are just promoting the delay discourse. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that the strategies to address these two types of fairness impacts will be quite different.
Who Killed the Carbon Tax?
EB: I’d like to pivot a little bit to an emblematic case, and talk a bit about what worked and what didn’t. Mark Carney recently repealed the consumer carbon price. This was a policy that was supposed to be fair but the public didn’t get that. What mistakes were made and what lessons can be applied to future policy rollouts?
AH: Just to frame my answers, nobody predicted a global pandemic or the enormous inflation in the wake of that and the affordability concerns that came with that. Secondly, fairness perceptions are multi-dimensional. I think the communications around fairness and the carbon price often focussed pretty narrowly on household financial impacts, even though we know people don’t think about fairness only through that lens. I think that narrow focus is something that could be revised.
More concretely—Louise, this is something you raised in our previous discussion so I want to make sure it gets in here— this distance between the visible cost at the pump and the abstract benefits from the rebates was a real problem. Carbon pricing has real, immediate and noticeable costs and that’s not something we think about when we model carbon pricing.
Another thing is that it was a challenge to communicate the effectiveness of carbon pricing. The policy works at reducing emissions by explicitly raising the price of fossil fuels. That’s not an easy thing for a politician to sell. If we want carbon pricing that will work in Canada, we need to square that circle.
LC: I think the distance and time issue is one of the key points. However, Canadians also perceive Canada as a low polluter. We’re green, we’re clean, we’re good. This idea that we are good, that’s what’s being challenged here right?
We’ve listened to people in focus groups on carbon pricing since 2015 and they could not understand “why me?” a small polluter with an insignificant impact on the environment. People felt they were being asked to do more than their fair share relative to their contribution to the problem.
In my opinion, the government should have stopped talking about the consumer carbon price and spent most of its time talking about the industrial carbon price and how it was moving to regulate Canada’s biggest polluters before we even got to the consumer piece.
You know, people pay at the pump, this happens every week. Months later you get something in a bank statement. Only an economist could have designed something that had no relationship to how people live their lives. So the consumer carbon price is a lesson that I hope gets a lot of attention and helps us improve our understanding of how to design climate policy.
EB: This does bring to mind Jim Stanford’s report Counting the Costs, which showed that the single biggest of the surge in inflation in the later years of COVID was a spike in oil prices that was completely avoidable, but oil and gas companies avoided any blame for the way they have impacted affordability.
You all found that the idea of an industry carbon price was generally more favoured than a consumer one. But then one of the responses is that the industry consumer price will still be costly to consumers because the costs to industry will just get passed down to them. What’s your take on how this perception has developed? And how could you imagine combating this narrative?
LC: The industrial carbon price is one of my favourite topics. So first off, the price was designed to maintain competitiveness. It’s meant to send a signal to pursue efficiency and innovation so that they aren’t disadvantaged when selling to a country that has no carbon price. But as a result, a large proportion of industrial emissions remain unpriced and will continue to be unpriced for the foreseeable future.
I gave all this context to say that I think this feels like an issue we need to grab hold of and fact check, put out accurate information about what the industry pays and what they don’t. The Canadian Climate Institute has said that the current cost of the industrial carbon price in the oil sands is the price of a Timbit. This is the kind of simple piece of information that can help counter the claim that this will be bad for consumers.
I would say the next year in climate policy is going to be a fight over industrial carbon pricing. It’s very clear from the work I do on the policy side and listening to the Prime Minister as closely as I do that the emissions cap is gone. That will go quite quickly. And I think it’s a trade to keep industrial carbon pricing. So how does that all fit with communications? It’s now a target, and it’s going to become a symbol for why climate policy is unaffordable. This needs to be really thought through. We need to find a way to position Canada’s biggest polluters as not paying their fair share and that the industrial carbon price is designed so that it will not affect consumers.
AH: I think that’s a fantastic answer. What stands out is that there’s a lot of technical information to share that is hard to communicate, like marginal pricing. But the other thing I think about is that, when people are thinking about how costs are getting passed down to them, that actually represents a pretty sophisticated understanding of how our economic system works. I wonder if it’s worth getting out ahead of the story and acknowledge that yes, compliance costs do get passed down. I don’t think it’s credible to say that the cost won’t get passed down.
KR: I’d like to add that we assume the perceived policy cost is the main driver of opposition, but in work done in the US and Europe, policy cost is not a significant predictor of support. I have found that it’s the restriction of choice people don’t like when it comes to industrial pricing. Whenever people think they are being forced into something like driving an EV or riding a bike, it drives a huge amount of opposition.
LC: That is such an important point. It’s actually coming up right now in relation to this energy superpower narrative. The frame is that we’re in an emergency, which is designed explicitly to rob us of our sense of perceived choice. We have no choice, we have to accept a pipeline. In my opinion it is absolutely immoral but that’s a separate conversation.
Always Consider Your Audience
EB: We’ve talked a lot about what to avoid saying or fixating on in our communications around these policies. What do you think communicators should be highlighting in their messaging?
AH: My mind goes to audience. Making financial benefits more immediate and visible does make sense in a particular context for a particular audience. Recommending that across the board is probably not a good idea.
We have this group, maybe 20 per cent of voters who are climate progressives, where making front centre works. But the audience we should be thinking about is that big chunk in the middle who kind of support climate action in the abstract but they don’t have time to think about what the policies actually mean in terms of specific policy instruments. For these people it’s more about communicating tangible parts of a policy that they can see in their everyday lives.
LC: For me I think of loss and gain framing. So, you know we did the Five Canadas segmentation. So Progressive activists, they are information seeking and ready for solutions. But the Civic nationals and Centrist liberals, you have to establish what the risk is from climate change and then frame the issue around what they could lose.
I think we really want to test this idea more carefully, this idea that the risks of loss can motivate people. I think this also matters when we communicate about energy efficiency programs. For some it’ll be about what they lose in future savings if they don’t make their house more energy efficient. For others it might be about what they gain in terms of status or modernization.
EB: This does make me think of recent rise in insurance costs in areas prone to wildfires or flooding, and the opportunity there as a communicator, is to frame this rising prices through a loss frame. For example, you will lose your insurance if you don’t take steps to FireSmart your home.
KR: We do also need bigger concepts that include capitalizing on trust in government. I don’t know how to do that, but things like improving transparency and communication would be a start. We know that climate policy exists because of high trust in government.
We also need to think about governance systems. It’s really hard to remove a policy when you have to go to court and spend a lot of money on fighting a regulator that will roll out in favour of climate change anyway.
It is so easy to create negative discourse via social media and academics and communicators are not prepared to fight the fight on social media. Especially with AI-based technologies emerging, we’ll never have the funding equivalent to what the fossil fuel industry has. So creative protective governance mechanisms and thinking about going to the courts and asking, “is it okay to lie to people with greenwashing?” or cost recovery lawsuits. I think this is one way to go after these companies.
Building New Narratives of the Future
EB: I think your comment about bigger narratives is so key. I’ve been discussing this question of larger narratives with a colleague, thinking about what people expect from the future. If I were to say to an audience, “oh, well, you know, we all know the world’s ending.” People understand that, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. We have this normative frame about the future as being bad and so how do we think about new frames that perceive our future as actually worth fighting for and seeing it as a beautiful thing?
LC: I think you need to spend more time with seniors.
KR: Or young people, they are so excited about all these technologies. They have so many suggestions for how to make technology cooler.
LC: I agree, I think it’s a particular segment. The work I’m doing with seniors is all designed to work with their grandchild. It is essentially leaving that middle cohort and making those intergenerational connections because there is a lot of positivity in terms of what seniors see in the world and want to leave behind, and getting them to work with their grandchildren on it is a powerful campaign I think.
KR: My son’s school is merged with the Cordova Bay 55 Plus Association. It is so good for discussing the future. They pickleball with them every other day, they learn seniors are really strong, much better at pickleball than they are. It’s a great governance model.
EB: Intergenerational conversations bring context to our present too. This conversation about “the end of the world” has happened before with the threat of nuclear war for example.
Think About How your Policies Flow
EB: Aaron in your research, you found that carbon pricing was considered less fair and effective than regulations. I think you both found that to some degree, but when you dug into it a bit more you hypothesized that regulations that are more abstract were the ones that were rated fairer and more effective. So in your opinion, what can policymakers take away from this observation when deciding on a policy choice and how to talk about it?
AH: So I don’t actually want to overstate the significance of this finding. In this snapshot, that was done in August 2024. Policies perceived as operating behind the scenes or at an industry level saw higher support, so that kind of take alone suggests that the visibility of a policy and its proximity to personal choice matter more than the policy type.
For policymakers though I think the observation offers two implications. The first is that regulations have a communications advantage, in that they can be framed more easily as direct climate actions rather than indirect price signals that have to work through the economy. On the other hand, when regulations explicitly target consumer technologies, they require messaging that address concerns about choice and accessibility.
The second point is that policy sequencing matters. This isn’t something we’ve talked about yet, and it’s kind of wonky, but our findings do suggest that beginning with maybe less visible industry measures might allow for a demonstration of effectiveness and fairness before introducing a more consumer facing intervention. So there’s a temporal aspect to this. It’s kind of taking this all into account as a strategy, and hopefully building trust and kind of like familiarity as well for how the broader policy approach all works together.
Add More Voices in Policy Design
EB: We’re on to our last question. Climate policy design has mostly been dominated by economists and technical experts. Louise, you’ve alluded to this, but most people don’t actually think about the world in technical terms. So who else should be at the table or should have a bigger role when designing climate policies?
AH: We’re seeing this fundamental disconnect between technical policy design and how we’re modelling these policies, and public reception. Public support is primarily driven by psychological drivers, like perceptions of fairness and impacts on social groups. And what this disconnect produces is pretty technically sound but politically vulnerable policies that can be effectively attacked by opposition and carbon pricing exemplifies this. I think the kind of broader climate strategy needs participation from social scientists, people who study risk perception, behavioural economists and representation from groups that will influence those fairness judgements so rural communities, low-income households, youth advocates.
I think getting people with different perspectives involved early, maybe can help troubleshoot these things that come up down the line.
LC: I agree with all of that. One of the things you will always hear from communicators is that policymakers always bring them in at the end. So we need to bring social scientists, behavioural psychologists, depending on the kind of regulation we’re talking about. We need to broaden the breadth of advice that’s informing policy design early in the process.
The other thing is, I do actually think with this new government there’s a chance to reflect on our approach on climate policy and reset, and that means bringing in the social side as an equal partner with economists and engineers and so on.
KR: I actually think we should leave the communication to people like Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Swift. The reason I’m saying that is because if we disagree on climate policy choices, let’s have those celebrities, people who are trusted on both sides of the society showcase their EVs, heat pumps, their donations and fundraising.
I would slightly disagree with bringing in more social scientists, because I only work with social scientists and we all disagree. Academics tend to be stubborn who don’t understand how policy regulations require public engagement or how long it takes.
And finally, we need youth advocates. Youth are so fatigued by this whole depressing dystopia that climate scientists are trying to push so hard. They want to hear about cool things. So let’s talk about exciting things with them.
EB: I really take that point Katya, Jared Wesley who’s out of University of Calgary uses this term “pracademic” to describe himself. Academics can of course get into petty squabbles or have absolutely no interest in policy.
LC: Yes totally, we need applied, action researchers who are trying to solve real problems.
