Dan McTeague

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”

The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!

Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.

But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the  environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”

Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.

No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.

Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.

Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.

But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.

Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.

Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.

The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.

EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.

Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.

And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.

So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.

“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”

A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.

These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.

But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

 Dan McTeague

Carney and the Trudeaupians in his cabinet haven’t had some kind of massive conversion. They’ve not done any soul searching. There’s no repentance here for having made our lives harder and more expensive. They remain ideologically opposed to Affordable Energy.

Over the next several days you will see headline after headline proclaiming that the Carbon Tax is old news, because Mark Carney has repealed it. ‘Promises made, promises kept!’ will be the line spouted by our bought-and-paid-for media, desperate to prevent Pierre Poilievre from winning the election.

Of course, this will be the same media who has spent the past few years declaring that Canadians love, are positively infatuated with, Carbon Taxation. So forgive me for scoffing at their sudden about-face, clapping like trained seals when Justin Trudeau’s newly anointed heir waives his pen and proclaims to the electorate that the Carbon Tax is dead.

The thing is, it’s not. It’s still there. And it will still be there as long as Mark Carney is running the show.

And of course it will. Mark Carney is an environmentalist fanatic and lifelong Apostle of Carbon Taxation. Just listen carefully to everything he’s said since he threw his hat in the ring to take over as PM. He’s said that the Carbon Tax “served a purpose up until now,” but that it’s become “too divisive.” He was careful to always pledge to repeal the Consumer Carbon Tax, rather than the entire thing. And in the end he didn’t even do that, just zeroed it out for the time being.

Carney and the Trudeaupians in his cabinet haven’t had some kind of massive conversion. They’ve not done any soul searching. There’s no repentance here for having made our lives harder and more expensive. They remain ideologically opposed to Affordable Energy.

The fact is, the only reason they’re changing anything is because we noticed.

They’re determined that that won’t happen again. The Carbon Tax will live on, but as hidden as it can possibly be, buried under every euphemism and with every accounting trick they can think of.

Trust me, we at CAE would be taking a victory lap if the Carbon Tax were really dead. We did as much as anyone – and more than most! – to wake Canadians up to what it was doing to our quality of life, our ability to gas up our cars, heat our homes, and afford our groceries. When the day comes that this beast is actually slain, we will have quite the celebration.

But that day is not today.

What happened, instead, was that an elitist Green ideologue shuffled the deck chairs on the Titanic in the hopes that the working people of Canada would miss the Net-Zero iceberg bearing down on us.

Don’t be fooled!