#Just out of his electric Jaguar (because nothing says “I’m staying in touch with the average person” like a Jaguar), Justin Trudeau took the stage at the Conference of the Parties (COP26) meeting in Glasgow yesterday.
Trudeau’s message in Glasgow: his extreme green agenda is about to get, well, more extreme.
Here are the “highlights”:
– a carbon tax set to reach 170 dollars a ton in less than a decade. (Over four times its current price);
– a second carbon tax called the “Clean Fuel Standard”, or CFS, that he sneaked by with little notice as a regulation;
– a tax on methane that is, in effect, a third carbon tax for anyone using natural gas (and this represents more than a third of our energy in Canada);
– billions in handouts to cities to buy electric buses that then don’t work well in the Canadian winter (and in some cases need polluting diesel generators to be heated);
– billions to the provinces for electric vehicle charging station subsidies so that people wealthy enough to buy an electric car can find a place to charge it;
– billions in handouts to an international fund to help other countries reduce their emissions with the same;
And that’s not all, even at a time when the country is massively in debt and more so every day, when the cost of living is rising dramatically and banks are now signaling interest rate rises are coming, when Canadians are trying to come out of over a year and a half of unprecedented lockdowns and start society up again……..
Now the Prime Minister says Canada will put an absolute cap on oil and gas emissions, and lower that cap every year.
All these announcements might seem like mere noise to most of us. This is because we don’t appreciate the day-to-day implications – who has the time to figure out what all of this means? And it sounds good, doesn’t it? You know, because “green.” Because it’s 2015, um, no – because it’s 2021.
But Canadians need to know these latest installments of Trudeau’s green agenda have very real implications. And yesterday’s announcement should drive the point home.
If you don’t allow greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to rise, how do you build infrastructure projects? How do you grow your economy? How do you deliver oil and gas exports to nations that want them and can’t believe we won’t export them? How do you get our oil and gas – some of the most cleanly produced in the world – to places where people still heat with much dirtier, much less efficient, much less healthy wood and dung? The fact is you don’t.
Trudeau’s announcement is his most powerful signal yet that he will kill the Canadian economy to satisfy his ideological green agenda. Our lives are about to become significantly more expensive.
And this doesn’t have to happen.
But Trudeau is making it happen.
Will resource company CEOs finally stand-up?
Will all those executives bending over backwards to show how committed they are to being “green” finally defend the interests of their shareholders – all of us who have their stocks in our RSPs and pension funds – and say “enough is enough”? Will our energy executives start to express even the slightest interest in the hundreds of thousands of Canadians currently in their employ – people who will lose their jobs as a result of Trudeau’s policies?
Life is going to get even less affordable. But wow, that electric Jaguar is a nice-looking car isn’t it?
An 18 year veteran of the House of Commons, Dan is widely known in both official languages for his tireless work on energy pricing and saving Canadians money through accurate price forecasts. His Parliamentary initiatives, aimed at helping Canadians cope with affordable energy costs, led to providing Canadians heating fuel rebates on at least two occasions.
Widely sought for his extensive work and knowledge in energy pricing, Dan continues to provide valuable insights to North American media and policy makers. He brings three decades of experience and proven efforts on behalf of consumers in both the private and public spheres. Dan is committed to improving energy affordability for Canadians and promoting the benefits we all share in having a strong and robust energy sector.
An 18 year veteran of the House of Commons, Dan is widely known in both official languages for his tireless work on energy pricing and saving Canadians money through accurate price forecasts. His Parliamentary initiatives, aimed at helping Canadians cope with affordable energy costs, led to providing Canadians heating fuel rebates on at least two occasions.
Widely sought for his extensive work and knowledge in energy pricing, Dan continues to provide valuable insights to North American media and policy makers. He brings three decades of experience and proven efforts on behalf of consumers in both the private and public spheres. Dan is committed to improving energy affordability for Canadians and promoting the benefits we all share in having a strong and robust energy sector.
Ever since Mark Carney’s rise to power, people have been trying to sell me on the idea that he’s just what this country needs — a (supposedly) practical, no-nonsense businessman who can clean up the mess his highly-ideological predecessor, Justin Trudeau, left us in. To reinforce this claim, they point to the constant rumblings about Carney’s commitment to building new oil and gas pipelines in Canada.
I’m sorry, folks, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Now, building new pipelines is an understandably popular idea. Construction alone would be a serious job creator. New pipelines would enable us to further capitalize on our abundant natural resources. They would pump up the domestic oil and gas supply, bringing down the cost of energy for families and businesses alike, thereby invigorating our economy and fortifying the Loonie.
They would also reinforce national unity at a time when that is being sorely tested.
Green propaganda has created and increasingly widened ideological divides over the resource sector, still the backbone of our economy. Our thriving activist class are happy to exploit these divisions and to do whatever they can to kill new resource projects before they get off the ground. Over time, this has made it just plain easier to sell Canadian fossil fuels to the US, which has been happy to take them off our hands.
Make no mistake, if we made good use of this period of unfortunately high tensions with our cousins to the south, by beefing up our energy infrastructure and fortifying our economy, which would ultimately make us a more attractive trading partner, I’d be all for it.
That said, anyone who believes that Carney is fully committed to new pipelines should revisit what he’s actually said on the matter. They would discover that he has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on pipelines since the moment he stepped out from behind the curtain and publicly took the reins of the Liberal Party. He’s been purposely vague when talking to pipeline-sympathetic crowds out west, and explicitly reassuring when speaking to anti-pipeline crowds elsewhere, saying things like “I would never impose [a pipeline] on Quebec.”
Which should surprise no one! Mark Carney is still Mark Carney. From his banking career to his time at the megafirm Brookfield, from his role as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Leadership and Finance to founding the (now collapsed) Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), he has spent his entire career working towards a net-zero global economy, no matter how disastrous this would be for the world generally and Canada specifically.
Carney himself described his magnum opus, GFANZ, as being “relentlessly, ruthlessly, absolutely focused on the transition to net-zero.” The same could be said about Carney himself.
Which is to say, though he is more sophisticated, Carney is no less of a “Green” ideologue than Justin Trudeau.
“But, but, but!” I can hear people saying, “He saved us from the carbon tax!”
To which I answer: No, he did not. A longtime apostle of carbon taxation generally, and of Trudeau’s carbon tax specifically, Carney’s main issue with the carbon tax was that it had become “too divisive” — meaning we had noticed its effect on our lives and started complaining about it. To fix that, he used what amounted to an accounting trick to hide it from our view.
Meanwhile, he remains committed to all of his party’s environmentalist legislation and regulations, including the Clean Fuel Standard, which jacks up the ethanol content of our gasoline, while progressively raising the price per litre; Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which significantly reduces our ability to export our natural resources; Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental positives of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard; and the egregious Electric Vehicle mandate, which forces us to buy, starting next year, cars which are poorly suited for our climate, geography, and lifestyle, and for which we simply do not have the infrastructure.
And, most pertinent to this discussion, Mark Carney remains committed to Bill C-69, the “No More Pipelines Act,” which even the Supreme Court said overstepped the federal government’s constitutional authority.
So despite all of their advantages, Mark Carney’s decades of net-zero commitments make the chances of us actually getting a single new pipeline out of this government extremely remote, probably nonexistent.
U.S. tariffs continue to threaten the Canadian economy. Meanwhile, Canada’s debt levels continue to grow. The obvious solution is to develop our oil and gas and become an energy superpower. However, time is running out for Prime Minister Carney to act.
He’s talked a big game but has failed to act as anti-energy Liberal laws continue to drive away investment. This week, TC Energy and Enbridge have indicated they’d prefer to make investments in the U.S. instead of Canada.
