David Suzuki says Mark Carney refuses to discuss the environment: ‘PURELY A POLITICAL MOVE’
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David Suzuki is calling out Prime Minister Mark Carney after the two met briefly, but Suzuki never got a chance to air his concerns about the environment.
“He gave me 15 minutes. He never let me talk,” Suzuki told hosts Travis Dhanraj and Karman Wong on the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast last week.
The 90-year-old environmentalist recalled Carney acknowledging that his government is “not doing enough,” while the pair posed for a photo.
“He got a chance to get his picture with me,” Suzuki said. “It was a purely political move. It wasn’t a serious conversation.”
#NEW: David Suzuki says @MarkJCarney did not let him speak when they met. Grades him on environment…#cdnpoli
— Travis Dhanraj (@Travisdhanraj) November 10, 2026
Full Interview:https://t.co/EsVvFTJyxp pic.twitter.com/W9maGSxaFe
‘No politician will say the truth’
Suzuki admitted that Carney has been “generous” and “very good” to the David Suzuki Foundation.
But once Carney got into power, Suzuki says he’s been forced to “cut him a lot of slack,” since he’s had to confront U.S. President Donald Trump and deal with “our tightly tied economies.”
He added: “But of course, the tragedy is that his rush to find alternative sources of buyers, what he’s doing is basically opening up Canada and he’s relieving all of the environmental restrictions.”
Suzuku said several times in the episode that “No politician will say the truth,” and now, Carney is behaving like one.
“As my friend Stephen Lewis kept telling me, ‘He’s a banker! He is not going to be good for the environment!’ And Stephen was right.”
‘You have to resign’
Suzuki also brought up Steven Guilbeault, calling his one-time colleague and the former environment minister the “best” Canada has ever had — until he wasn’t.
“Steven and I were colleagues,” he gushed. “He was with Greenpeace. I was with the Suzuki Foundation in 1997 in Kyoto. We were arm in arm together.”
But that all changed around the halfway mark of Guilbeault’s term as Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, which he served from Oct. 26, 2021 to March 13, 2025.
“After he’d been minister for two years, I said, ‘you have to resign,’” Suzuki recalled telling Guilbeault.
“‘You have to resign and tell the public why you resigned. You can’t even tell us the truth,’” he continued. “‘You’re the minister of the environment and climate and you can’t tell us that we are in an emergency, a crisis.’”
Blame Harry and Meghan
Suzuki recounted receiving a “terrifying report” he received from the United Nations in 2019.
“They said that we’re in a major extinction crisis, that half the species that were here on the planet when I was born in 1936 are extinct, and another million are poised to go extinct,” he recalled.
“The day after this terrifying report came out from the UN, Harry and Meghan had a baby,” he continued. “And guess what disappeared [from the news cycle]?”
A failing grade
When Dhanraj asked Suzuki to grade Carney on his environmental actions, or lack thereof, the climate activist was quick to answer: “Right now, he’s obviously an F. F, F, F.”
He added: “But it’s only because he’s a politician. He’s doing [grade] A stuff on confronting and not giving in to Trump. A-plus.”
Suzuki pointed out that he believes Carney “cares and thinks about the environment” but scoffed at the PM’s ideals that he can bring about the changes by “market mechanisms.”
“That is dead wrong because the market and the economy is the driving force of the destruction,” Suzuki declared.
Suzuki previously condemned Carney
It’s the second time in as many months that Suzuki has slammed Carney’s priorities.
Suzuki acknowledged in a September interview with the Canadian Press that he was “willfully blind” and simply wanted to believe in Carney as our nation’s leader.
“I don’t see that there’s going to be any deviation from the driving of our country into the ditch,” Suzuki said at the time, suggesting that Carney’s shift in priorities has resulted in Canadians’ views on climate also changing.
“I think that’s because of that disconnect of what are the really basic things are that keep us alive,” Suzuki said.
“He still believes the economy must be kept going the way it is and that it can be used to keep emissions down and keep the economy going,” he added. “I think it’s impossible.”
