Dan McTeague
In 2025, we have much to look forward to so let’s celebrate now
By Dan McTeague
That light at the end of the tunnel we thought was an oncoming train? It might be the sun after all!
“Tis the season to be jolly,” says the song, and commonsense-loving Canadians would do well to follow that dictum this Christmas season.
To be sure, Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power have harmed our country and its people immeasurably. Trudeau has waged a multi-front war on both the production and consumption of hydrocarbon energy, the backbone of the Canadian economy.
The Trudeau government, devoted as it is to the damaging Net Zero ideology, instituted a Carbon Tax, appropriately set to increase every year on April Fool’s Day, of all days, so that Canadians would get progressively acclimated to paying more for energy every year. Like frogs in a slowly heating pot.
He was so devoted to this increase that he refused to postpone it during the dark early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when no one knew what was going on, unemployment was rising sharply, and the country was looking at a severe economic downturn. That’s ideology for you.
The Carbon Tax, compounded as it is by the less-known Clean Fuel Standard, which I’ve dubbed the Second Carbon Tax, has been an albatross around the neck of the Canadian economy, making it difficult for us to keep our heads above water. It has made it increasingly more expensive to heat our homes in a famously frigid climate, and to gas up our cars in a huge country where driving is a necessity.
Those are its obvious consequences, but somewhat less commented on has been its secondary effects on the price of goods and services. The Carbon Tax raises the cost of business at every step of our supply chain, from the farm to the grocery store, and that cost is ultimately passed onto the consumer.
And then there are the Electric Vehicle (EV) mandates, which will become an issue much sooner than you realize. The Trudeau government has mandated that by 2035, in just about a decade, every new car, SUV, or light truck sold in Canada must be an EV. This despite the fact that EVs are less reliable — once again, especially in the cold.
Charging EVs is extremely inconvenient, generally taking hours. And that’s if you can even find a charger — Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need to build about 450,000 charging stations to meet the needs of the country, if Trudeau’s EV transition is going to work at all. Right now we have about 28,000.
They’re also expensive to produce, which is why the Trudeau government (along with their partners in crime, the Ford government in Ontario) have been heavily subsidizing their production. And they’re expensive to buy, which is why the government has been subsidizing their purchase. Which is to say, billions of taxpayer dollars are being shoveled into both ends of the EV dumpster fire!
And one of the most recent outrages perpetrated by this government has been the emission cap, which as I said in these pages a few months ago, “make Canada the only country in the world which willingly and purposefully stifles its single largest revenue stream.”
After all, a report commissioned by the Government of Alberta found that an Emissions Cap would lead to a 10% decrease in Alberta’s oil production and a 16% decrease in conventional natural gas production. The report estimates that “over the 2030 to 2040 period… real GDP in Alberta is $191 billion lower and real GDP in the Rest of Canada is $91 billion lower, compared to the baseline scenario.” Instead of growing, the economies of Alberta and Canada will have contracted by 2040, by 4.5% of GDP for the former and by 1.0% of GDP of the latter.
And if that is too abstract, it just means that working men and women, throughout our country, not just in our western provinces, will struggle to provide for their families, whether or not their professions have anything to do with oil and gas. That’s what a shrinking economy looks like.
Now, I could go on and on this way, touching on housing, crime, or rising unemployment, but a truly exhaustive list of Trudeaupian blunders might take us all the way to Easter. But I did open this article by counseling us all to rejoice, in the proper spirit of this season. And, despite this bleak picture, there is good reason to do so.
First off, rejoice because the results of Trudeau’s catastrophic governance have been noticed. Regular people have soured on his policies, particularly the supposedly “green” ones. Hammering away at the Carbon Tax has put Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a pretty good position to win the federal election we’re set to have on or before (preferably before) October 20, 2025. At which point we can begin the process of doing a significant course correction and putting the past 9 years behind us.
That is easier said than done. It will take a lot of hard work on the part of the Conservatives to undo the ideological policies which have made our lives unaffordable, and there will be the temptation to go after the low hanging fruit by, say, canceling the Carbon Tax and leaving the rest of the rotten Net Zero superstructure in place.
That would be bad, and if they try anything along those lines, I will be the first to call them on it. Even so, they are unlikely to actively make things worse, which makes them better than the Trudeau Liberals.
But more importantly, we should rejoice because politics isn’t everything. That’s easy to forget when we’re throwing elbows on Twitter/X and elsewhere, but there’s more to life than this. With all of our problems, we’re still blessed to live in a beautiful, peaceful country with abundant natural resources and full of good people.
So my advice to you, dear reader, is to make it a point during these holidays to spend some time with family and catch up with some old friends, whatever their political persuasion.
You won’t regret it.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
Dan McTeague
Cards on the table, I’m skeptical of the current state of the polling in this election. My sense is that Mark Carney and the Liberals’ numbers are, at least in part, a byproduct of sympathetic pollsters over-sampling their key demographics, and those being trumpeted to high heaven by the publicly-funded media. That, coupled with voters’ justifiable annoyance at Donald Trump’s “51st State” cracks and tariff threats, has contributed to an illusion of enthusiasm, a sense that they are running away with this thing.
That said, one polling data point has struck me as being both real and important. A recent Abacus Data poll showed that, when you cut out all the distractions, Canadians’ biggest concern remains our inflated cost of living. And that is an issue which clearly favors Poilievre and the Conservatives.
That’s because the dire state of our economy can largely be laid at the feet of the Liberals, who’ve been running the show for the past decade. Yes, they’ve made a change at the top, but not much of one. On top of being a globe-trotting member of the “Green” Elite, and champion of environmentalist banking, Mark Carney was a Liberal advisor for years, a key part of the Trudeau “brain trust” — trust me, I use that term loosely — that cooked up a whole raft of economy smothering “Green” policies which have done nothing to reduce global carbon emissions, but have succeeded in lightening our wallets.
Under Trudeau, our annual GDP growth noticeably shifted from the 3% range towards the end of the Harper years to the 1% range more recently. Household debt-to-income ratios rose steadily in the same period, while real household spending per capita dropped 2-3% below 2019 levels by 2024, as costs and interest rates went up. Disposable income growth has been outpaced by inflation and taxes, and bankruptcy filings have risen 40% since just 2019.
Canadian food prices have exploded by 35-40%, with family spending up over 50% over the past decade. Consequently, food insecurity rose to 23% by 2023, from around 8% in 2015, and Food Banks Canada has reported a 78% surge in usage from 2019 to 2023.
Meanwhile, Canada’s national debt, which was just over $600 billion when Justin Trudeau was handed the federal credit card, has roughly doubled, reaching over $1.2 trillion by the time he left. And provincial debt has risen by about $1 trillion in the same period.
It’s a frightening financial snapshot. And many of these negatives can be attributed to the Liberals’ war on oil and gas, which remains — however much Carney might wish otherwise — the backbone of our national economy.
So much of the Liberals’ time and effort in government has been spent kneecapping the resource sector, and for purely ideological reasons. From Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act of 2019, which significantly reduces our ability to sell oil and gas abroad, to Bill C-69, which added mountains of red tape for infrastructure projects, so much so that it was nicknamed the “No More Pipelines” Act.
You’ll remember that the Supreme Court ruled the “No More Pipelines” act largely unconstitutional two years ago. Even so, Carney recently said he has no intention of repealing it, prompting Poilievre to tweet out, “This Liberal law blocked BILLIONS of dollars of investment in oil & gas projects, pipelines, LNG plants, mines, and so much more,” with an excellent infographic attached, listing the various cancelled energy projects throughout Canada since the Liberals came to power.
And then of course, there’s the Consumer Carbon Tax, which started out at $20 per tonne of CO2 emitted in 2019, small enough that many Canadians barely noticed they were paying it, but increased every year until it hit $80 per tonne.
By that point it became so noticeable and unpopular that the Liberals felt they had no choice but to “cancel” it (“zero it out” is more accurate), before it could reach the $170 by 2030 which they’d planned. Still, it remains on the books, ready to be raised again, without a vote, if Carney so chooses.
Even if he doesn’t, Carney has doubled down on the Industrial Carbon Tax. While the Liberals claim this is an improvement because it isn’t paid by working Canadians, only by big evil “polluters.” Of course, they said something similar about the Consumer Tax, that by some financial wizardry, we regular folks would get back more than we paid in, which turned out to be total bunk.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Tax makes our lives more expensive in essentially the same way as the Consumer Tax. It raises the cost of doing business, of heating our homes, of filling up our car, of our grocery bills. It just does so by a less direct route, by taxing businesses instead of individuals, so that we pay when the price of goods and services goes up in response.
The Industrial Carbon Tax, much like Trudeau’s Clean Fuel Regulations, is ultimately a hidden tax, and that suits Carney just fine. He’d prefer that we not know who to blame as our cost of living skyrockets.
The Liberal Party’s economic record over since 2015 has been atrocious, and it will be no different under Mark Carney. He is complicit, and he continues to support policies which would make us poorer, like Bill S-243, the “Climate-Aligned Finance Act,” which Carney testified before the Senate in support of last year. That bill sought to make it nearly impossible for banks to invest in, or loan money to, oil and gas projects in Canada, and tried to force financial institutions to appoint board members ideologically opposed to fossil fuels.
Canada needs to change course, and soon. As things stand, it will be tough for even a good captain to navigate us through the rough seas the Liberals have steered us into over the past ten years. A few more, and with Mark Carney at the helm, might make that impossible.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
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“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.
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