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Dan McTeague

The Carbon Tax ship is sinking

Published

7 months ago

7 minute read

From Canadians for Affordable Energy

Dan McTeague

Written By Dan McTeague

In a shocking turn of events, just weeks before the upcoming provincial election, Eby said that if re-elected his government would end the provincial carbon tax on consumers, provided the federal government removed the “legal backstop” that requires them to keep a tax in place.

Here’s a surprising development – the Carbon Tax, which was a keystone policy of the Green Left just a few short years ago is now a political pariah. Though, for some of us, it isn’t so surprising.

As you will recall, the federal Carbon Tax back was one of the Trudeau Liberals’ first announcements upon taking power. It was meant to set the tone for their commitment to tackling the “climate crisis,” and achieving net zero carbon emissions. The policy required that all provinces and territories which did not have their own carbon pricing scheme in place would have one imposed on them by Ottawa.

The Carbon Tax had buy-in from Green apologists all over the country, including many Conservative politicians. You may recall Patrick Brown, former leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, stunning an audience of PC Members in 2016 when he announced. “Climate change is a fact… We have to do something about it, and that something includes putting a price on carbon.” Ever the political opportunist, Brown had bought into the notion that you can’t win if you aren’t in favor of a carbon tax.

And that is how it was sold. The carbon tax was inevitable. And it would come with all sorts of environmental benefits – ending forest fires, floods, and combatting all manner of bad weather. Plus, the price would mainly be paid by greedy corporations. The average Canadian, they said, would actually be getting more money back on the tax rebate than they’d paid in the first place. In their telling, the carbon tax sounded like it was all carrots and no sticks!

Of course, that was too good to be true. There were, in fact, plenty of sticks. Sky-high gas prices, heating bills, food prices, and an overall increase in our cost of living. Eventually the Parliamentary Budget Office issued a report which confirmed what many Canadians had already learned, that the tax would be a net loss for most households, with the middle class being particularly hard hit.

No wonder public support started to wane, and then to spiral. Even Trudeau’s desperate rebranding – he started calling the tax “pollution pricing” – couldn’t save it.

A Leger poll released earlier this year revealed that 7 in 10 Canadians do not support the Carbon Tax. It helps that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has made ‘Axe the Tax’ a cornerstone of his campaign, consistently making the case that the Carbon Tax is harming consumers and making the country less competitive.

What was once considered the unsinkable Carbon Tax is now taking on water. And lots of it.

We saw early signs of this earlier this year when the annual Carbon Tax increase, scheduled for April 1st, was loudly opposed by a number of premiers. Even Liberal premiers, such as Andrew Furey of Newfoundland and Labrador, pleaded with Justin Trudeau to hit pause on the increase.

More recently, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has been waffling on the tax as currently structured, suggesting that it has “put the burden on the backs of working people.” Of course, as the Conservatives like to remind him, Singh voted in favor of this same tax twenty-four times in the House of Commons.

But perhaps the most significant nail in the carbon tax coffin came courtesy BC Premier David Eby. Remember that it was BC, under the Liberal premier Gordon Campbell, who implemented the first Carbon Tax in 2008 – not just the first in Canada, but rather, the provincial government claims, the first “revenue neutral” Carbon Tax in the world!

The Carbon Tax has been a hallmark of BC’s climate policies for nearly two decades. But in a shocking turn of events, just weeks before the upcoming provincial election, Eby said that if re-elected his government would end the provincial carbon tax on consumers, provided the federal government removed the “legal backstop” that requires them to keep a tax in place.

With Eby’s main opposition also pledged to repeal, it seems that even in the policy’s birthplace, no one wants to touch the carbon tax with a ten foot pole!

Now Eby defended the move by claiming essentially that the Trudeau Liberals’ fumbling of the issue has “badly damaged” what he says was the political consensus on the carbon tax. But the reality is that this was bound to happen eventually. In my capacity as President of Canadians for Affordable Energy, I’ve been warning Canadians for years that Trudeau’s carbon tax increase, compounded by his Clean Fuel Standard, which I’ve dubbed the Second Carbon Tax, would not only raise the price of fuel, but would increase the price of all goods, groceries included.

Once Canadians saw what the tax actually cost, and felt its devastating impact on their ability to make ends meet, to fill their gas tanks, heat their homes, and feed their families, they were bound to turn against it. This is exactly what we’re seeing now. And with elections looming, as go the voters so go the politicians who need their votes.

It seems the Carbon Tax is sinking and the rats are jumping ship.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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I don’t believe these polls!

Published on April 12, 2025

By

CAE Logo 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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2025 Federal Election

Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Published on April 6, 2025

By

CAE Logo Dan McTeague

“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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