TORONTO – Greenpeace Canada is calling on BMO to end its partnership with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) in response to the oil lobby’s publication of a 2025 federal election platform that calls for a major rollback of environmental legislation and an end to all federal regulation of emissions reduction and carbon pricing. 

“The oil lobby is no longer even pretending to care about the climate, so BMO needs to pick a side,” said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada. “BMO can’t claim to be committed to climate action while colluding with an oil lobby group that is calling for the utter destruction of Canada’s national climate plan.”

BMO recently changed its public climate commitment from “We are committed to building a sustainable future and advancing a path toward a net-zero world” [1] to a new version: “to be our clients’ lead partner in the transition to a net-zero world, enabling innovative climate solutions and supporting sustainable outcomes in our role as a financial institution.” In either case, the oil lobby group’s recently released election platform (CAPP’s 2025 Federal Policy Priorities: How our next government can leverage the energy sector for all Canadians) takes the world in the opposite direction. 

CAPP’s election platform calls for Canada’s next federal government to:

  • Abandon all national emissions reduction policy and carbon pricing (i.e. “letting provinces take the lead on any emissions reductions policies and pricing systems in their jurisdictions”);
  • Weaken national greenhouse gas reduction targets (i.e. “aligning our emissions reduction goals with our partners and other allied major oil and gas producing nations”);
  • Repeal the Impact Assessment Act (which for the first time made climate change a consideration in energy project approvals) and the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act (which bans large oil tankers along British Columbia’s north coast); 
  • Abandon the proposed oil and gas emissions cap;
  • Remove the anti-greenwashing provisions of the revised Competition Act. 

CEOs from 14 of the largest oil and gas companies subsequently published an open letter repeating many of these demands (with an even more specific call for abandoning the industrial carbon price). In response to media questioning, they acknowledged that implementing their recommendations would make it harder for Canada to meet its greenhouse-gas emissions targets.

BMO became the sponsor of CAPP’s annual Energy Symposium in 2023, after Scotiabank dropped its sponsorship of the event (and its membership in CAPP) after a Greenpeace protest during their AGM. BMO is hosting the 2025 BMO-CAPP Energy Symposium on April 8 and 9 in Toronto, only days before BMO’s April 11 Annual General Meeting where shareholders will vote on a resolution calling on the bank to fulfill its commitment “to lobby in a manner consistent with [its] support for the aims and objectives of the Paris Agreement.” 

ENDS

Notes to editor:

[1] As of March 24, 2025, this was the definition on their Climate Institute page (still available on the Internet archive).

For more information, please contact:

Keith Stewart, Senior energy strategist, Greenpeace Canada

[email protected] ; +1 416-659-0294