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Canada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy

Published

6 months ago

8 minute read

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.

First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.

The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.

On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.

There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.

That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.

The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.

The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.

Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.

In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.

Author:

Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
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Mark Carney is trying to market globalism as a ‘Canadian value.’ Will it work?

Published on April 4, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

A campaign to appeal to national sentiment is a strange gambit for Liberals – committed as they are to the replacement of the nation with globalist policies.

The storm over Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs over the Canadian border crisis has been baked into a vote-winning meme by Canada’s Liberal Party. Yet with an election only weeks away on April 28, can a sentimental appeal to a vanished Canada secure a win for Mark Carney?  

Trump’s tariffs were expected to hit Canada on Wednesday’s “Liberation Day,” refueling a furor over Canadian sovereignty which has led some to say this is “shaping up to be the trade war election.”

Responding to the tariffs, which ultimately never came to fruition in the way the Liberals were warning, a meme war broke out with Carney responding to harsh reality with a feelgood slogan.  

“Elbows up!” is the new Current Thing in Canada, a media craze designed to stir nationalist indignation in elderly voters who may even remember the 1950s origin of the phrase.  

The elbows refer to those of Gordie Howe – a 1950s hockey legend from Saskatchewan – a conservative province – and from a time when Canada was populated by Canadians.  

It bears all the hallmarks of an “astroturf” campaign – intended to look authentic, but in reality a manufactured mass belief for marketing purposes. 

“Elbows up” seeks to inspire a fighting mood against the threat – or promise – of tariffs on Canadian trade with the U.S.  

Carney will ‘cave’

It is a classic example of the manipulation of popular feeling into political allegiance. How will the feelings of aging voters affect the imposition of tariffs? Not at all. Nor will the Canadian Prime Minister be able to stop them.  

Silence over ‘devastating’ Chinese tariffs caused by Trudeau

Why? Carney has no alternative. He has already “caved” – to China – over the same issue. “Devastating” Chinese tariffs took effect over a week ago in Canada, as Global News reported:  

Canadian agricultural producers are warning of devastating impacts from new Chinese tariffs that began Thursday (March 20th), which they say will compound the economic strain from the U.S. trade war.

The tariffs are severe, and will have a dramatic impact – as China is Canada’s second-largest trading partner behind the United States. 

“China has imposed a 100 per cent levy on Canadian canola oil and meal, as well as peas, plus a 25 per cent duty on seafood and pork,” the outlet reported.  

These tariffs cannot be corrected by hockey memes, and are a response to tariffs placed on Chinese goods by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Liberal Party – seeking election over outrage on tariffs – has created a tariff crisis, whose costs will be borne by the people who vote for them.  

There are no “elbows up” against China. In fact, their tariffs have been greeted with silence from Carney, who has said U.S.-Canada relations are at an end. 

Corruption, drug cartels in Canada

Anger at Donald Trump obscures the serious problems which prompted his suggestion that Canada could be absorbed into the United States. “Elbows Up” is a cool way of making Canadians look past the fact that the crisis they inhabit has been created by the Liberals and their globalist agenda. 

On February 1, Trump issued an executive order “Imposing duties to address the flow of illicit drugs across our northern border.”

Terry Glavin, writing in January for Canada’s National Post, dismissed Trump’s earlier claims of a crisis over Canadian “border security and drug trafficking” as a “pretext” for his “…declared objective of exerting ‘economic force’ to annex Canada as the 51st American state.” 

Yet this too appears to be a fantasy inspired by national sentiment – which simply ignores reality. 

As LifeSiteNews reported, Canada’s second bank has laundered over 18 trillion dollars in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican and Chinese drug cartels. The world’s largest fentanyl factory was discovered in Vancouver in February.    

Canada a ‘failed state’?

The serious issue of corruption by Chinese Triads combines with a picture of impotent Canadian law and border enforcement to suggest that Canada may be, as Glavin warned, “approaching failed-state status.” When the memes wear off, this is the reality faced by Canadian voters.  

Canadians have complained since 2017 that life is too expensive to have a family. 

Now “a generation” cannot afford a home, and many struggle to pay for groceries. Help is at hand, however.  

Their Liberal government supports Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) – killing the elderly, poor and ill as healthcare – whilst promoting radical “gender” ideology to help sterilize children. 

Will Carney come to the rescue?  

Carney is a committed “Net Zero” fanatic, and is the kind of “Catholic” who fervently supports abortion.  

His moral integrity is demonstrated further by the fact that his $25 billion “green” investment fund was located in Bermuda to dodge Canadian taxes. 

As the Canadian Catholic Register cautions, “[Carney] is a well-connected globalist with deep ties to institutions such as the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Bank for International Settlements, and the Financial Stability Board.” 

Globalist ‘Canadian’ values

National identity is a strange appeal to make on behalf of a party which appears to be working hard to replace Canadians with immigrants, and which is now lead by a globalist technocrat.  

It is the values of globalism, of course, which are presented to voters as “Canadian values”: open borders, LGBTQ “rights,” “gender” surgery and hormones for children, and the Net Zero deindustrialization program strongly supported by the Liberal leader Mark Carney.  

How long can this appeal to save the nation of Canada from foreign influence convince Canadians to vote for more of the same? The Liberal Party has led Canada into crisis, presiding over corruption so severe that its police, judicial and border authorities are deemed incapable of being trusted by the USA.   

This is not a charge made solely by the Trump administration, but also under Biden – with Antony Blinken pressing the matter of the insecurity of the Canadian border as far back as 2022. In the coming weeks, the real issues which have consigned Canada to a fond memory may well shrink the Liberal lead reported by the polls. 

What do the polls say?

With some headlines trumpeting an “eight point lead” for the Liberals, others show a narrower advantage for the globalist Carney – and one leading firm has them tied with the Conservatives. 

Abacus Data’s March 30 poll had both parties neck and neck at 39%. Abacus, who describe themselves as “Canada’s most sought-after, influential, and impactful polling firm,” “…were one of the most accurate pollsters conducting research during the 2021 Canadian election.”

A second poll shows a narrower lead, and a clear bonus for Carney for simply not being Justin Trudeau.  

338 Canada showed a four point lead for the Liberals on March 31, and its graph clearly illustrates that their lead relies on disaffected NDP voters – and the collapse of the Bloc Quebecois vote. 

Reality enters the chat 

With the issues at home now overtaking Trump and his tariffs, the cost of living and those allied to mass migration such as housing are returning to the forefront of voters’ minds. The issue of reality – and who is the real Mark Carney – may well overtake the fake nationalism of “Elbows up.”

A campaign to appeal to national sentiment is a strange gambit for Liberals – committed as they are to the replacement of the nation with globalist policies – and of its people through mass immigration. Carney has been powerless to halt Chinese tariffs. He is powerless to halt those of Donald Trump.  

If Canadians can see beyond cringe hockey memes these two issues are clearly a reaction to the actions and inaction of a Liberal-led Canada. This is the reason that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning on the harm done to Canadians by the “lost Liberal decade.” If Canadians can be persuaded by the argument presented by reality, it seems unlikely they will vote for another – whatever the polls may say.

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Business

‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

Published on April 4, 2025

By

JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.

Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.

“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.

WATCH:

With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.

“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.

“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.

The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.

“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”

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