Economy
Kamala Harris’ Energy Policy Catalog Is Full Of Whoppers

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The catalog of Vice President Kamala Harris’s history on energy policy is as thin as the listing of her accomplishments as President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” which is to say it is bereft of anything of real substance.
But the queen of word salads and newly minted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has publicly endorsed many of her party’s most radical and disastrous energy-related ideas while serving in various elected offices — both in her energy basket-case home state of California and in Washington, D.C.
What Harris’s statements add up to is a potential disaster for America’s future energy security.
“The vice president’s approach to energy has been sophomorically dilettantish, grasping not only at shiny things such as AOC’s Green New Deal but also at the straws Americans use to suck down the drinks they need when she starts talking like a Valley Girl,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at Institute for Energy Research, told me in an email this week. “To be honest, she’s no worse than many of her former Senate colleagues who have helped cheer on rising energy costs and the fleeing American jobs that accompany them. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of reliable and affordable domestic energy, good skilled jobs or the national security implications of domestically produced energy, but maybe she will go back to school on the matter. No doubt on her electric school bus.”
During her first run for the Senate in 2016, Harris said she would love to expand her state’s economically ruinous cap-and-trade program to the national level. She also endorsed then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s harebrained scheme to ban plastic straws as a means of fighting climate change.
Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told me proposals like that one would lead during a Harris presidency to the “Californication of the entire U.S. energy policy.” “Historically,” he added, “the transition of power from a president to a vice president is designed to signal continuity. This won’t be the case, because a Harris administration will be much worse.”
But how much worse could it be than the set of Biden policies that Harris has roundly endorsed over the last three and a half years? How much worse can it be than having laughed through a presidency that:
— Cancelled the $12 billion Keystone XL Pipeline on day one.
— Enacted what many estimate to be over $1 trillion in debt-funded, inflation-creating green energy subsidies.
— Refused to comply with laws requiring the holding of timely federal oil and gas lease sales.
— Instructed its agencies to slow-play permitting for all manner of oil and gas-related infrastructure.
— Tried to ban stoves and other gas appliances.
— Listed the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as an endangered species despite its protection via a highly-successful conservation program.
— Invoked a “pause” on permitting of new LNG export infrastructure for the most specious reasons imaginable.
— Drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for purely political reasons.
As Biden’s successor for the nomination, Harris becomes the proud owner of all these policies, and more.
But Harris’ history shows it could indeed get worse. Much worse, in fact.
While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.
Consider also that while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It is not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal and climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.
As I have detailed here many times, every element of climate-alarm-based energy policies adopted by the Biden administration will inevitably lead the United State to become increasingly reliant on China for its energy needs, in the process decimating our country’s energy security. By her own words and actions, Harris has made it abundantly clear she wants to shift the process of getting there into a higher gear.
She is an energy disaster-in-waiting.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Carbon Tax
The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

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-
2025 Federal Election
Fixing Canada’s immigration system should be next government’s top priority

From the Fraser Institute
Whichever party forms government after the April 28 election must put Canada’s broken immigration system at the top of the to-do list.
This country has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. Were it not for immigration, our population would soon start to decline, just as it’s declining in dozens of other low-fertility countries around the world.
To avoid the social and economic tensions of an aging and declining population, the federal government should re-establish an immigration system that combines a high intake with strictly enforced regulations. Once Canadians see that program in place and working, public support for immigration should return.
Canada’s total fertility rate (the number of children, on average, a woman will have in her lifetime) has been declining, with the odd blip here and there, since the 1960s. In 1972, it fell below the replacement rate of 2.1.
According to Statistics Canada, the country’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.26 in 2023. That puts us in the company of other lowest-low fertility countries such as Italy (1.21), Japan (1.26) and South Korea (0.82).
Those three countries are all losing population. But Canada’s population continues to grow, with immigrants replacing the babies who aren’t born. The problem is that, in the years that followed the COVID-19 lockdowns, the population grew too much.
The Liberal government was unhappy that the pandemic had forced Canada to restrict immigration and concerned about post-pandemic labour shortages. To compensate, Ottawa set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents for 2025, double the already-high intake of about 250,000 a year that had served as a benchmark for the Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Liberal governments of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien.
Ottawa also loosened restrictions on temporary foreign worker permits and the admission of foreign students to colleges and universities. Both populations quickly exploded.
Employers preferred hiring workers from overseas rather than paying higher wages for native-born workers. Community colleges swelled their ranks with international students who were also issued work permits. Private colleges—Immigration Minister Marc Miller called them “puppy mills”—sprang up that offered no real education at all.
At the same time, the number of asylum claimants in Canada skyrocketed due to troubles overseas and relaxed entry procedures, reaching a total of 457,285 in 2024.
On January 1 of this year, Statistics Canada estimated that there were more than three million temporary residents in the country, pushing Canada’s population up above 41.5 million.
Their presence worsened housing shortages, suppressed wages and increased unemployment among younger workers. The public became alarmed at the huge influx of foreign residents.
For the first time in a quarter century, according to an Environics poll, a majority of Canadians believed there were too many immigrants coming into Canada.
Some may argue that the solution to Canada’s demographic challenges lie in adopting family-friendly policies that encourage couples to have children. But while governments improve parental supports and filter policies through a family-friendly lens—for example, houses with backyards are more family-friendly than high-rise towers—no government has been able to reverse declining fertility back up to the replacement rate of 2.1.
The steps to repairing Canada’s immigration mess lie in returning to first principles.
According to Statistics Canada, there were about 300,000 international students at postsecondary institutions when the Liberals came to power in 2015. Let’s return to those levels.
The temporary foreign worker program should be toughened up. The government recently implemented stricter Labour Market Impact Assessments, but even stricter rules may be needed to ensure that foreign workers are only brought in when local labour markets cannot meet employer needs, while paying workers a living wage.
New legislation should ensure that only asylum claimants who can demonstrate they are at risk of persecution or other harm in their home country are given refuge in Canada, and that the process for assessing claims is fair, swift and final. If necessary, the government should consider employing the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to protect such legislation from court challenges.
Finally, the government should admit fewer permanent residents under the family reunification stream and more from the economic stream. And the total admitted should be kept to around 1 per cent of the total population. That would still permit an extremely robust intake of about 450,000 new Canadians each year.
Restoring public confidence in Canada’s immigration system will take much longer than it took to undermine that confidence. But there can be no higher priority for the federal government. The country’s demographic future is at stake.
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