The first sentence that appears in Catherine McKenna’s recent memoir Run Like a Girl is “Life is messy.”
She stands by that.
“The thing that I wanted to do most in my life was to be an Olympic swimmer. And I failed,” says McKenna, LLB’99, who, as Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, led the Canadian delegation during the final negotiations for the international Paris Agreement on climate change.
To be fair, McKenna came close – she made it as far as the Olympic qualifying trials. It was a huge disappointment, but she credits her years of swimming with teaching her “the discipline to keep showing up even when progress feels slow,” a skill that has served her well in life. Later, she was an associate at one of the country’s top law firms, with a future partnership looking likely. Many would have been envious, but she left after realizing the job wasn’t a good fit.
“Life is a journey and it isn’t always linear,” says McKenna. She says her book isn’t meant to be “prescriptive or a how-to guide,” but it does explore how she has managed the twists and turns of her own life, and she hopes some of that will resonate with readers – particularly young readers.
A vehicle for making change
“I remember being at university and having no idea how to make change in the world,” says McKenna. And while she is quick to say that “politics is a vehicle for making change, but it isn’t the only way to do it,” she does hope to encourage more young people to consider becoming involved in politics.
Before she ran for office herself, “I remember going to events [with politicians] and reading their bios and I’d be like, ‘well, that’ll never be me.’ I want [young people] to feel it can be them. Nobody in politics starts off as a fully formed politician.
“We don’t want to follow the trap of the United States where, for a long time, they’ve just had an older generation [dominating the political scene],” McKenna says. “We need young people and new ideas.” She cites the example of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, “one of the most amazing politicians I’ve ever seen.”
Before entering politics, McKenna practiced law in Indonesia, helped negotiate an international treaty for Timor-Leste, served as a senior lawyer on an independent review of Canada’s military justice system, and co-founded Canadian Lawyers Abroad, a non-profit that matched organizations in developing countries with lawyers and law students in Canada who could assist them with their legal skills. She also headed the Banff Forum, a national conference focused on public policy discussions.
“I think it’s unconscionable that this is going on. And there are things that can be done. We can hold social media companies much more responsible for what they’re doing.”
Former federal cabinet minister Catherine McKenna
When McKenna decided to run federally for the Liberals in an Ottawa-area riding, the response from most Liberal Party establishment figures wasn’t especially supportive (one key exception was Penny Collenette, who provided invaluable counsel). They didn’t think she had much of a chance against a popular NDP incumbent and, in any case, believed that somebody with a higher profile than her should be the Liberal candidate. Thanks, in part, to the support of the mothers of her children’s friends and classmates and soccer teammates – “They saw me as somebody normal, somebody like them” – McKenna won the nomination and then the election. She estimates that she and her team of volunteers knocked on 100,000 doors in the riding.
Shortly after the election, an impressed Justin Trudeau, BA’94, named her to his cabinet – giving her only days to prepare for the Paris Agreement talks. Run Like a Girl recounts how those talks nearly collapsed over the use of single word (“shall” vs “should”) and how McKenna played the lead role in shaping the most ambitious climate plan in Canada’s history. Along the way, she met Pope Francis and received a surprise FaceTime call from a supportive Arnold Schwarzenegger.
‘I need to call this out’
McKenna is candid about some of the less savoury aspects of political life – particularly the toxic abuse she regularly had to contend with.
She was famously labelled “Climate Barbie” by her opponents – but McKenna had to deal with far worse. One man filmed himself yelling obscenities at her in front of her kids. Offensive slurs were painted on her riding office. Threats were posted online.
“I need to call this out because I lived it,” says McKenna. “I think it’s unconscionable that this is going on. And there are things that can be done. We can hold social media companies much more responsible for what they’re doing. We can hold politicians responsible because while it’s fine to have attacks on policy, personal attacks and doxing [and] coordinating with rage farming outlets is really not okay. And we need to take the security aspect much more seriously.
“We think we’re different in Canada, but [people in the UK] probably thought they were different too until [British Member of Parliament] Jo Cox was killed. It’s a big problem and it goes far beyond me. It’s about democracy and whether good people will want to run for public office and whether we allow social media companies to [facilitate] these pile-on attacks and abuse.”
Studying law at McGill
McKenna began her law studies at McGill shortly after Quebec’s divisive 1995 referendum. In her book, she writes that the discourse around sovereignty “was still very raw for many students.”
She recalls getting along well with students on both sides of the debate. “My French separatist friends [at McGill] were often the most fun.”
One of the things she appreciated the most about her legal studies at McGill was that “it wasn’t just about how to be a lawyer; it was about learning how to use the law to advance the causes that were important to you.”
Once she became a MP, she encountered several familiar faces from her McGill law days, including cabinet colleagues David Lametti, BCL’89, LLB’89, and Marc Miller, BCL’01, LLB’01, and then-Governor General David Johnston, LLD’00.
‘An obituary for carbon pricing’
Before last year’s federal election, Prime Minister Mark Carney abandoned consumer carbon pricing, a key component of McKenna’s climate plan.
“I’m still slightly scarred, but I get it,” McKenna says of Carney’s decision. “I did support Mark Carney, even though he said he was going to kill the consumer pricing, because I knew that … if the Liberals lost [the election], we would lose all of our climate policies.”
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s “axe the tax” mantra, characterizing consumer carbon pricing as a contributing factor to the affordability crisis was effective – but fundamentally false, according to McKenna.
“Middle-income people and low-income people were actually better off [with carbon pricing], because they were getting more money back than they were paying,” stresses McKenna. “The money was recycled.”
In one section of the book that she describes as “an obituary for carbon pricing,” McKenna outlines the reasons why the policy became so vulnerable to Poilievre’s attacks.
She lays some of the blame at the feet of her own government. Having criticized former prime minister Stephen Harper for his use of publicly funded advertising to support his government’s agenda, the Liberals were reluctant to use ads to explain how carbon pricing worked.
“We were bringing in a consequential policy that was complicated, and it required people to file their taxes to get their money back, But I wasn’t allowed to advertise,” says McKenna.
Other things went wrong. The Parliamentary budget officer miscalculated the costs of the program, leading to a wave of bad press. The Canadian Revenue Agency said it couldn’t issue rebate checks that would have made it clear to taxpayers that they were being reimbursed for higher carbon costs. Then Trudeau, under pressure from Atlantic province MPs, put a pause on carbon pricing for heating oil.
“That was the final nail in the coffin,” says McKenna. “There was a sign on the podium [when Trudeau announced the policy shift] that said, ‘Making Life More Affordable.’ That was totally inconsistent with the message [we were trying to get out], which was that carbon pricing was about affordability and fairness.”
Life after politics
McKenna continues to be active on environmental issues. She launched Climate and Nature Solutions, a climate change advisory firm. She founded Women Leading on Climate, a global coalition of female business leaders, policy experts, activists and others committed to tackling climate change. And she was UN secretary general António Guterres’s pick to chair the High‑Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, an initiative that targets corporate “greenwashing.”
After the expert group issued its report at the UN’s 2022 Climate Change Conference in Egypt, Guterres asked McKenna to carry on in the role.
“If you’re a company and you’re going to put up your hand and say that you’re [committed to non-zero emissions], well, there’s a price of admission for that,” says McKenna. “You can’t just have a long-term target; you need to have short-term goals. You need to tie executive compensation to [climate-related] outcomes. You can’t be investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure.
“Sometimes people talk about you like you’re naïve if you’re working on climate issues,” says McKenna. “No, we are the hardest core realists. We can see what’s coming [if we don’t act] and it’s a direct threat to people’s lives and livelihoods. The question is, why aren’t more people just doing what makes sense?”
