Mark Carney’s first budget ostensibly promises to clean up the Trudeau era’s regulatory clutter around “greenwashing,” punitive energy emissions measures and industrial standards.

A change in tone is better than nothing, whether or not this talk of clashing “red tape” ends up amounting to anything meaningful. Tone alone is not a shift in direction, and people who want to invest in Canada will make their decisions based on rules and timelines they can easily understand.

What is true is that the past decade has produced an arbitrary maze of climate rules, presented in dense, unreadable prose that even the most seasoned lawyers would struggle to make sense of. Unintelligible rules mean empowering bad actors and activists, with the cost being paid in unrealized projects.

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