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BC voters ditching climate crisis for promise to unlock natural resource development

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From Energy Now

The LNG Canada facility under construction in Kitimat, British Columbia

Climate Goals Face B.C. Election Backlash in Home of Greenpeace – B.C. Conservatives Have Upended Race With Focus on Unlocking Natural Resource Development

An unlikely political upstart in Canada’s third-largest province, expelled from his previous party for climate science skepticism, is within striking distance of winning power with promises to ditch environmental targets and unleash natural-resources development.

The surge in support for John Rustad’s Conservative Party of British Columbia ahead of the Oct. 19 election may have been helped by the popularity of the unaffiliated federal Conservatives. Victory would add to the roster of right-leaning premiers at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in Ottawa.

A Conservative government in BC might mark a bigger shift than anywhere else in the country. The province is famous for environmentalism — Vancouver is the birthplace of Greenpeace and home to Canada’s most famous climate activist, David Suzuki. David Eby, the current premier, unsuccessfully opposed the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline, and back in 2008 the province brought in one of North America’s first carbon taxes.

Although polls favor Eby’s left-leaning New Democratic Party, it’s close, and a spread between pollsters suggests the result remains unpredictable.

The public has endured inflation and strained local services, slower growth in an economy dragged by higher interest rates and lower exports, and a government that’s gone from surplus to a record C$9 billion ($6.5 billion) deficit. British Columbia, once rated AAA by S&P Global Ratings, has suffered three credit rating downgrades in three years.

Conservatives Have Surged in BC Polls

British Columbia’s Conservatives vault official opposition in election surprise

Source: Research Co.

The ruling NDP — whose origins lie in labor unions — is parrying criticism of its own mixed seven-year record in office. It’s running on blunting the cost of living with subsidies, tying the minimum wage to inflation, taxing home speculation, blocking Airbnb Inc.-style short-term rentals and using hydrocarbon revenues for a “clean economy transition fund.”

Rustad’s rise is also a stunning tale of revenge. The longtime representative of Nechako Lakes — a district 600 miles north of Vancouver in BC’s deep interior — was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party in 2022 on his birthday after sharing a social media post questioning carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. He took over the BC Conservative Party, then a marginal force in provincial politics. Before long it had leapfrogged his old party in the polls.

Acrimonious talks to merge the two groups failed, and by August the previously formidable Liberals — which had rebranded as BC United — gave up, withdrawing from the election in an effort to unite voters against the NDP.

Unlocking Natural Resources

In an interview with Bloomberg, Rustad said he won’t cut social, health or education spending — a majority of the budget. He’s also promising tax cuts and plans to deepen the deficit to more than C$10 billion in his first year.

His plan to balance BC’s budget over eight years is based on an optimistic 5.4% average GDP growth rate to 2030 — more than double the average rate of the past five years — fueled by axing CleanBC, the NDP plan to cut BC’s emissions 40% by 2030. Rustad said that would save as much as C$2.5 billion in government spending, then bring in billions in extra revenue by unlocking industrial projects.

Foremost among them is LNG Canada, a new liquefied natural gas project in the remote north that the federal government said may be worth C$40 billion — possibly the largest private investment in the country’s history. There’s a plan to double its size, but it’s proving tricky to power with BC’s zero-emission hydroelectricity instead of fossil fuels, because it would need a new transmission line, with one previous cost estimate at C$3 billion.

Not a problem if looser rules let them burn gas.

“In British Columbia, we could stop everything we do, and by next year the increases from China and India will swamp anything that we’ve done,” Rustad told Bloomberg. “So my perspective is we need to make sure we’re looking after people. And so for a changing climate, we need to be able to adapt to it.”

When he appeared on climate-skeptic Canadian influencer Jordan Peterson’s podcast, Rustad said: “How is it that we’ve convinced carbon-based beings that carbon is a problem?”

Conservatives Gain In Tight BC Election Race As Rival Withdraws
John Rustad Photographer: Ethan Cairns/Bloomberg

Rustad also talked up billions in extra revenue from streamlining mine permits — one of BC’s oldest industries and more prominent in the remoter parts of the province he hails from.

Asked about BC’s rural vote, Rustad says: “There’s no question, the NDP completely ignored it.”

Rustad also wants to ditch BC’s carbon tax to cut costs for businesses and consumers. That’s also the top rallying cry for federal Conservatives, who are trying to force a “carbon tax election” to topple Trudeau. Provincial carbon taxes are federally back-stopped, so to banish the tax Rustad would need the Conservative Party of Canada to take power.

“The top-of-mind issues that people are frustrated about are inflation and the cost of living, housing and health care,” Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, said in an interview. “And what we’ve seen is that the federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been able to connect those public concerns with the carbon tax. It’s given them something that they can focus their frustrations on.”

Even the climate-conscious NDP has pivoted away from defending the carbon tax to pledging they would repeal it for consumers — but unlike the Conservatives, they would shift the burden to corporate “polluters.”

In his plan to speed up business, Rustad has also taken issue with BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act because it causes “friction”. It requires government to seek Indigenous people’s “free, prior and informed consent” to implement measures that may affect BC’s more than 200 Indigenous communities.

Rustad’s Conservatives include Indigenous candidates, and he talks about supporting economic reconciliation — the material, financial side of redressing Canada’s colonial injustices. But some First Nations leaders have called his platform “dangerous” for pitting British Columbians against each other.

Relentless Controversies

Rustad’s biggest weak point may be the controversial things said my members of his team, leading to relentless stories since they’ve been thrust into the spotlight.

Despite his dry, phlegmatic style, the same goes for Rustad himself. He’s said he regretted getting the “so-called” Covid-19 vaccine, and a clip showed him seeming to go along with an activist’s concept of “Nuremberg 2.0” — trials for officials who oversaw pandemic health measures. Rustad apologized and said he “misunderstood” the question.

Rival party staffers gave out BC Conservative-branded tinfoil hats after a candidate’s shared posts described 5G wireless signals as a weapon, according to local media. She was ousted, but another candidate who claimed vaccines can cause a type of AIDS remains part of the caucus.

Another apologized last week for posts including one in 2015 calling Palestinians “inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs.”

In communities like Metro Vancouver, some of the most diverse in North America, that kind of thing may jeopardize Rustad’s path to power.

But Rustad is also being cheered on by what Harrison described as an “accidental collection of voters who share frustration with the cost of living, the cost of housing, emergency room closures” — which could span from suburban families who judge the economy isn’t working for them to BC’s wealthiest, including billionaire Lululemon Athletica Inc founder Chip Wilson.

If Rustad pulls it off, his unorthodox strategy to turn one of Canada’s progressive strongholds conservative will reverberate with those fighting federal politics in the nation’s capital 3,000 miles away.

Carbon Tax

The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

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By Franco Terrazzano

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.

Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.

It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.

My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.


 
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax 

Every now and then, the underdog wins one.

And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.

It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.

It wasn’t always this way.

For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.

But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.

We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.

In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.

Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.

Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.

Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.

Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.

But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.

Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.

The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.

Thank you for everything you did.

The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.

This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.

Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.

This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.

Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-Tax-Rise-Canadas-Carbon

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2025 Federal Election

Poilievre To Create ‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor

Published on

From Conservative Party Communications

Poilievre will create the ‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor to rapidly approve & build the infrastructure we need to end our energy dependence on America so we can stand up to Trump from a position of strength.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre announced today he will create a ‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor to fast-track approvals for transmission lines, railways, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure across Canada in a pre-approved transport corridor entirely within Canada, transporting our resources within Canada and to the world while bypassing the United States. It will bring billions of dollars of new investment into Canada’s economy, create powerful paycheques for Canadian workers, and restore our economic independence.

“After the Lost Liberal decade, Canada is poorer, weaker, and more dependent on the United States than ever before,” said Poilievre. “My ‘Canada First National Energy Corridor’ will enable us to quickly build the infrastructure we need to strengthen our country so we can stand on our own two feet and stand up to the Americans.”

In the corridor, all levels of government will provide legally binding commitments to approve projects. This means investors will no longer face the endless regulatory limbo that has made Canadians poorer.  First Nations will be involved from the outset, ensuring that economic benefits flow directly to them and that their approval is secured before any money is spent.

Between 2015 and 2020, Canada cancelled 16 major energy projects, resulting in a $176 billion hit to our economy. The Liberals killed the Energy East pipeline and passed Bill C-69, the “No-New-Pipelines” law, which makes it all but impossible to build the pipelines and energy infrastructure we need to strengthen the Canadian economy. And now, the PBO projects that the ‘Carney cap’ on Canadian energy will reduce oil and gas production by nearly 5%, slash GDP by $20.5 billion annually, and eliminate 54,400 full-time jobs by 2032. An average mine opening lead time is now nearly 18 years—23% longer than Australia and 38% longer than the US. As a result of the Lost Liberal Decade, Canada now ranks 23rd in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index for 2024, a seven-place drop since 2015.

“In 2024, Canada exported 98% of its crude oil to the United States. This leaves us too dependent on the Americans,” said Poilievre. “Our Canada First National Energy Corridor will get us out from under America’s thumb and enable us to build the infrastructure we need to sell our natural resources to new markets, bring home jobs and dollars, and make us sovereign and self-reliant to stand up to Trump from a position of strength.”

Mark Carney’s economic advice to Justin Trudeau made Canada weaker while he and his rich friends made out like bandits. While he advised Trudeau to cancel Canadian energy projects, his own company spent billions on pipelines in South America and the Middle East. And unlike our competitors Australia and America, which work with builders to get projects approved, Mark Carney and Steven Guilbeault’s radical “keep-it-in-the-ground” ideology has blocked development, killed jobs, and left Canada dependent on foreign imports.

“The choice is clear: a fourth Liberal term that will keep our resources in the ground and keep us weak and vulnerable to Trump’s threats, or a strong new Conservative government that will approve projects, build an economic fortress, bring jobs and dollars home, and put Canada First—For a Change.”

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