On Thursday, in the final days of New York Climate Week and with world leaders still in the city for the UN General Assembly, Canada’s Environment Minister, Julie Dabrusin, announced that Ottawa is exploring a framework to trade internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, or ITMOs, under the Paris Agreement. The timing hardly looks accidental. For a week, the investors, registries and corporate buyers who make up the carbon removal market were all in one city, and many of the governments that will one day need to buy removal tonnes were across town at the UN. “This is about turning our natural advantages and homegrown climate innovation into investment, good jobs, and new export opportunities,” Dabrusin said.

For decades, Canada has thought of climate change as a problem it has to manage at home. This is the first real sign that it sees a different role for itself as well: the country that cleans up the world’s emissions.

Start with the acronym, because it’s doing a lot of work. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lets countries cooperate on their climate targets. An ITMO is a tonne of carbon reduced or removed in one country and transferred to another, which then counts it toward its own national commitment. The whole system rests on one rule. If Japan claims the tonne, Canada can’t. One tonne gets one claim, and it is tracked between governments.

Why would Canada want to be on the selling side of that trade? Because carbon removal turns out to be a geography problem. To pull CO₂ out of the air and keep it out, you need three things. You need abundant clean energy. You need rock deep underground that can hold carbon permanently. And you need people who know how to build large industrial projects in hard places. Most countries have one of these. A few have two. Canada has all three in unusual amounts. That’s why I argued two years ago that Canada is on the verge of a multi-trillion-dollar carbon removal industry . The same drilling, subsurface and pipeline skills that built the oil and gas sector carry over almost one-for-one.

Alberta has one of the most mature CO₂ storage regimes in the world, and projects there have now stored more than 18 million tonnes of CO₂. Climeworks, the Swiss direct air capture pioneer, set up its Canadian headquarters in Calgary this year. CarbonCapture Inc. moved its first commercial project from Arizona to Alberta . Its CEO put it plainly: “Canada was an obvious choice.” In Peace River, Svante and Mercer International are advancing a biomass carbon capture project at a pulp mill that could capture around half a million tonnes of biogenic CO₂ a year. On the Atlantic coast, Planetary and CarbonRun are among the world’s leaders in using the ocean and rivers to store carbon. The Canada Energy Regulator now counts 78 carbon removal companies and 48 active or planned projects in the country.

So the supply is showing up. The problem has been demand.

Only a small group of Canadian companies has bought durable carbon removal. Carbon Removal Canada counted roughly 14 buyers and about 150,000 tonnes . A Canadian project could always sell to Microsoft on the voluntary market, but the voluntary market has declined recently with Microsoft pausing new purchases. The largest future buyers have always been governments, which need removals to meet their Paris targets. Without an Article 6 framework, a country couldn’t count a Canadian tonne toward its own commitment. The Carbon Business Council says its Canadian members have roughly C$900 million in potential credit sales waiting for a way to reach international buyers. Until this week, that way didn’t exist.

It also matters why this is happening now. In January, Prime Minister Mark Carney told Davos the world was in “ a rupture, not a transition .” The United States has stepped back from the Paris Accord, from its allies, and from the very carbon removal hubs it once funded. That leaves an opening. Someone has to show that international climate cooperation can still produce real things: tonnes, jobs, trust. Canada is putting itself forward.

That fits a long Canadian habit. This is a country that has punched above its weight on the world stage, from peacekeeping to development aid. It has already pledged more than $13 billion in international climate finance beyond 2026. ITMOs add a new tool. Think of Singapore, a country that is densely populated, land-scarce and without large geologic storage. It can’t remove its residual emissions at home. Canada can do that removal here, under rigorous accounting, on Singapore’s behalf. Carbon removal becomes something Canada exports, the way it exports critical minerals, wheat, or potash.

There is a real tension here, and it deserves an honest look. Every tonne Canada exports is a tonne it can’t count toward its own target, and Canada is already falling short of that target. That trade-off is real. But the world needs carbon removal on a scale no single country’s domestic market can pay for. The only way to build that capacity is to let the whole world pay for it. The plants and pipelines that international buyers pay for now will be the same ones Canada relies on to clean up its own emissions.

Carney has spent much of the past year traveling the world, trying to sell what Canada makes: energy, critical minerals, food, and the expertise behind all of them. Seen that way, this week’s announcement is not a technical footnote. It’s a deliberate next step. Canada has figured out that one of the most valuable things it can offer the world is the ability to take carbon back out of the sky. The planet gets cleaner, trading partners meet their commitments, and communities from Peace River to Nova Scotia get industries worth building.

That’s a win, a win, and a win.