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

By David L. Thomas for Inside Policy

Canadians are rightly under the impression that migrants have been properly vetted before coming into our country. But it’s clear we’re not living up to expectations.

A recently de-classified 2022 report of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) suggests we’ve entirely misplaced our priorities when it comes to protecting Canadians from foreigners with dangerous backgrounds. Apparently referring prospective immigrants from places in the world beset with violent extremism for deeper background checks could constitute discrimination against those individuals that is “not justifiable on security grounds.”

Arbitrary discrimination on a prohibited ground is wrong. However, it is obviously important, for example, for the government to conduct proper security checks when we admit people into Canada as immigrants. There are times when certain discrimination might be warranted.

Essentially, for fear of being accused of discrimination, our national security oversight committee has deemed that checking prospective immigrants for ties to terrorist organizations is not a matter of national security. This is plainly absurd and is a grave risk to our national security.

The decision-style report of the NSIRA tribunal related to a group of complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) under the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). The large group of complainants were citizens of Iran seeking temporary or permanent visas to Canada and who were subjected to security background checks. They alleged discrimination on the basis of race and that the CSIS checks delayed the processing of their visa applications (reported by NSIRA as an average delay of 14 days for temporary visas and 26 days for immigration visas). Iran is a country with which we have no diplomatic relations and we have designated as a state sponsor of terrorism since 2012.

Without the resources of CSIS and a deeper security check, how could an immigration officer in the field determine if a visa applicant may have once been a member of a terrorist organization, like al-Qaeda, or a drug cartel? CSIS security checks are designed to look deeper into an individual’s background, sometimes with the co-operation of foreign spy agencies.

These complaints came across my desk in the final months of my term as the Chairperson of the CHRT. Having previously practiced immigration law for more than 20 years, I was well aware of CSIS security background checks. My expectation was that the NSIRA would recommend dismissal of the complaints because, well of course, checking whether a prospective immigrant is connected to a terrorist organization has to be related to the security of Canada, no?

Apparently not.

The CHRT complaints were suspended under a never-before-used section of the CHRA. Under Section 45, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada gave notice “that the (alleged discriminatory) practice to which the complaint relates was based on considerations relating to the security of Canada.” Despite this notice, the Human Rights Commission declined to dismiss the complaints and instead referred the matter to the NSIRA to provide a report on the matter.

The NSIRA report was the first of its kind and acknowledged there is little legislative guidance on the nature of its role under a Section 45 referral. However, in my view, the NSIRA has usurped the role of the CHRT by determining that the criteria applied for requesting the CSIS background checks “was not justifiable on security grounds.” In my view, their determination should have been limited to only whether the alleged discriminatory practices related to national security.

Nevertheless, the complaints are now proceeding before the CHRT to determine if it was discriminatory to make referrals for security background checks.

Arbitrary discrimination is, in most cases, against the law. However, there are exceptions, and one of them is Section 45 of the CHRA which creates a “carve out” from the normal rules when a matter of national security is on the line. And yet, the NSIRA decision bizarrely set aside national security and failed to grant the exception.

Canada has drastically increased its intake of migrants in recent years. Since 2021, the annual target for permanent residents was almost doubled to 500,000. Non-immigrant foreigners, mostly students and temporary workers, accounted for 2.5 million people, or 6.2% or the population in 2023. As these are people entering Canada legally, Canadians are rightly under the impression that migrants have been properly vetted before coming into our country. But it’s clear we’re not living up to expectations.

Canada recently admitted Muhammad Shahzeb Khan from Pakistan, accused of plotting a massive attack against Jews in New York last October. When this news broke Canada was still reeling from the embarrassment of having just granted Canadian citizenship to Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi. Along with his son, Mostafa Eldidi, he was arrested in July last year as the pair was accused of being in the advanced stages of  planning a violent attack on behalf of ISIS in Toronto. Apparently, Ahmed appears in a 2015 video dismembering an ISIS prisoner with a sword.

All prospective immigrants to Canada are subject to checks for past criminal activity. However, sometimes an immigration officer might flag an applicant for a security screening by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to determine if a visa applicant has ties to terrorist groups, espionage, war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.

In order to protect Canada, immigration officers in the field should have the unfettered discretion to refer any non-Canadian for a CSIS security background check. The referral is not a denial of entry into Canada. Applicants are just being asked to wait a little longer until we’re satisfied about their background. Immigration officers should not be second-guessing themselves about this discretion for fear of a human rights complaint.

Now is the time for Canada to set its priorities right. Our national security must be paramount and should not be hamstrung by unrealistic idealism.

David Thomas, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is a lawyer and mediator in British Columbia. From 2014 to 2021, he was the chairperson of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.