The Carney government has finally admitted its oil and gas emissions cap will destroy Canadian jobs while insisting the fallout is barely worth mentioning.

In a newly released Order Paper response to Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) under Minister Julie Dabrusin confessed the cap will cost about 4,000 oil and gas jobs between 2030 and 2032.

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But that’s just a fraction of the damage projected by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), who warned the same policy could eliminate 40,300 Canadian jobs and 54,400 full-time equivalents by 2032.

That means Ottawa is downplaying the job losses by 90 percent, pretending that only a small bruise exists where a gaping wound is forming.

Dabrusin’s department claims the discrepancy is because of “different assumptions.” The government’s internal Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement assumes industry will invent its way out of trouble, adopting new technologies to reduce emissions without cutting production.

This is why the Liberals went after @iedm_montreal at committee today. Renaud Brossard spent five minutes eviscerating the Liberals' 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan, arguing it would be harmful to jobs and the economy. pic.twitter.com/yqIOj3gTCU

— Sheila Gunn Reid (@SheilaGunnReid) October 23, 2025

The PBO took a more realistic approach, one that assumes you can’t legislate technological miracles. If companies can’t hit the targets, production falls, jobs disappear, and the economy takes a hit.

• The PBO projects GDP will shrink by $20.5 billion by 2032.

• Dabrusin’s bureaucrats claim GDP will dip by just 0.02 percent — a rounding error they call “modest.”

Ottawa’s model imagines an emissions cap with no pain; reality says otherwise.

The Fraser Institute blasted the government’s emissions cap as an economic time bomb. Economist Kenneth P. Green wrote that the cap will “kill many jobs in the oil and gas industry rather than create them.”

The think-tank’s analysis highlights that:

• The Conference Board of Canada estimates the cap could reduce national GDP by up to $1 trillion (2030–2040) and eliminate 151,300 jobs across Canada by 2030.

• Deloitte projects nearly 70,000 job losses and a 4.5 percent drop in Alberta’s GDP by 2040.

• Even if Canada wiped out every oil and gas emission, it would cut global emissions by only 0.4 percent — a rounding error on the world stage.

As Green put it, “Ottawa’s policy will hit Alberta with a wallop.”

The government’s “modest impact” is measured from an Ottawa desk, not from a Fort McMurray family kitchen. These aren’t numbers in a spreadsheet. They’re fathers, mothers, and tradespeople losing careers that sustain entire communities.

If 4,000 jobs vanished in downtown Toronto, it would be front-page news. But when it’s Western Canadian jobs on the chopping block, Ottawa calls it “progress.”

Even using its own soft math, the Liberal government admits thousands of Canadian workers will be sacrificed to a policy that will make no measurable difference to the global climate.