Erin O'Toole's Carbon Tax Flip-Flop

As I mentioned the other day Erin O'Toole has foolishly decided to flip-flop on the topic of Canada's carbon tax. And that's is the only way to describe this. While running for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, O'Toole signed a pledge which read as follows:

I, Erin O’Toole, promise that, if elected Prime Minister of Canada, I will: Immediately repeal the Trudeau carbon tax; and, reject any future national carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme.

That pledge, of course, was a big part of the reason that O'Toole beat out Peter MacKay for leadership. O'Toole appealed to the western provinces by calling MacKay a squish on resource issues. MacKay hit back, accusing O'Toole of secretly supporting the Trudeau climate agenda in one particularly heated debate. Here's Ezra Levant reluctantly commending MacKay for having O'Toole's number, and offering this conclusion on the current leader:

O’Toole supporting the carbon tax is disqualifying because he promised he wouldn’t, and he received support in return for that promise. So he’s untrustworthy. He’s a liar. It’s disqualifying because a carbon tax is a terrible idea, bad scientifically, bad economically.

He might have added that it specifically disqualifies him as a leader, since -- if reports from the Toronto Star and National Post are true -- his own caucus wasn't briefed on the change. “We all first heard about this from the CBC article,” one Tory M.P. told the Post. How can he ever have the confidence of parliament if he does things like this to his own members?

Of course, not everyone was upset by this development. Some were delighted. True North highlights this tweet from Trudeau crony Gerald Butts:

True North also points out a few notable and underdiscussed green goodies contained in the O'Toole proposal:

Other measures... include a study on “new taxes on frequent flyers, non-electric luxury vehicles and second homes to deter activities that hurt the environment.” A Conservative government would also spend $1 billion on domestic electric vehicle manufacturing and an additional $1 billion to deploy hydrogen technology.

Which is to say, he's all in.

Of course, O'Toole's counter to all of this is, first, that it is necessary for winning Ontario, and second, that at least his carbon tax is better than Trudeau's. I previously mentioned Dan McTeague's refutation of the first point. To the second, I would point to Derek Fildebrandt's argument in the Western Standard that the Tory plan is actually the worse of the two:

Under Trudeau’s plan, the federal government taxes consumers in provinces that do not have their own federally-approved carbon tax, and rebates a portion of it back to those consumers to spend as they see fit. Under O’Toole’s carbon tax, the federal government will impose a similar carbon tax, but instead of rebating it, will put into ‘green cards.' These green cards will be managed by a group of bankers appointed by O’Toole, and allow carbon taxpayers to spend the money collected on government-approved green purchases.... The real difference between the Trudeau carbon tax and the O’Toole carbon tax boils down to how taxpayers are allowed to spend the money collected from them. And on this front, Justin Trudeau’s plan is somehow, unambiguously better than O’Toole’s.

Several commentators think that this gamble will hurt the CPC's electoral prospects and O'Toole's career (Brian Platt mentions Patrick Brown as the nearest analogue, who outraged the conservative grassroots when he endorsed the carbon tax, so he had no one to back him up when other scandals arose, forcing him, finally, to resign). But the ever-cheerful sage Rex Murphy is concerned about its effects on the future of Canada itself:

The Conservatives are, if the rumours are true, about to enter an election, as a pale and timid version of the Liberal party, as near-partners to the NDP and the Greens. Out West voters will throw up their hands, sigh very deeply, stay at home, and really start thinking separation is the only way to go. Really, this policy is acid to Conservative support in the West and will, for some, force a rethink of their place in Confederation.

Back when O'Toole won the leadership race, I called on him to follow the advice of his fellow Ontarian, Shania Twain, to "dance with the one[s] that brought" him, meaning the Albertans and Saskatchewaners whose support gave him the 'W'. Instead, he's listened to the political consultant class who have long held that the path to Conservative victory is to copy the Liberals in every particular and to ignore the voters that they find embarrassing.

Well that choice seems to already be paying off... for Justin Trudeau. The latest polls suggest that, going into the rumored snap election to which Murphy alluded, Liberal support sits at 39 percent, six points above what they received in the 2019 General Election, which saw them barely hold on to power with a minority government. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are down seven points from the same election, at about 27 percent.

We tried to warn him.

As Canada Goes Green, Canada Goes Broke

It’s no longer news that the Liberal government of Canada under Justin Trudeau and his “social justice” cronies Gerald Butts and Chrystia Freeland have pulled out the stops in an effort to destroy the major source of Canada’s energy sector, the oil-gas-pipeline industry in the province of Alberta.

The oil sands have effectively become a dead letter. Every pipeline project has been quashed and energy companies have decamped for sunnier climes. The decline in Alberta’s GDP is pegged at 11.3 per cent. Unemployment and under-employment are rampant. The Alberta secession movement has acquired momentum and a political party, Wexit Canada, rebadged as the Maverick Party, has been formed—although the province’s Conservative premier Jason Kenney remains a staunch federalist and majority sentiment remains “loyalist.”

What Canadians do not seem to understand is that as Alberta goes, so goes Canada. For more than 50 years Alberta, Canada’s energy producing breadbasket, has been a major net contributor to the rest of the nation via the Equalization Formula in which “have” provinces subsidize their “have not” counterparts.

As Canada under the Liberal administration has now become a heavily indebted “have not” country, Alberta was its last remaining mainstay—until Alberta itself imploded thanks to the energy crushing policies of the federal government. It is now a “have not” province. 

Indeed, as Canada goes Green, Canada goes broke, forcing it to increase its debt load and enact burdensome domestic programs that will impoverish its citizens and devastate the productive classes. At a steadily approaching inflexion point, Canada will face the spectre of default—a time-honored South American prospect.

In an article for the National Post, former Conservative leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis shows why she would have been a far better choice for the Conservative nomination than the waffly, Andrew Scheer-like Erin O’Toole. Lewis reveals how the new creeping socialism operates, confiscating not our property but our wealth via various levies like a home equity tax, a ubiquitous carbon tax, a new tax on the private sale of homes costing home owners a portion of their retirement savings, and a “perpetual debt scheme reminiscent of Argentina.”

What is taking place, she warns, is “a quiet and bloodless revolution that seeks to control our lives through economic dependency.” Conrad Black believes “the government… has lost its mind”—though more likely it is acting quite deliberately, in full knowledge and intent, cleverly pursuing a soft totalitarian agenda. Meanwhile, most Canadians linger in a condition of blissful oblivion as the country they believe is theirs and continue to be proud of is being insidiously stolen from them before their very eyes.

Regardless, Canadians on the whole believe in big government and continue to vote left, ensuring that Trudeau’s Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP) helmed by Jagmeet Singh will likely retain control of parliamentary business and national policy. A recent Angus Reid poll indicates that nearly 60 percent of Canadian women would vote today for either the Liberals or the NDP under these two leaders. Such are the wages of feminism.

Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces—aka the “Laurentian Elite”—trend massively socialist, as do the major conurbations like Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. There can be no doubt that socialism is the name of the game. Trudeau has boasted that China’s “basic dictatorship” is his favorite political system and, as Spencer Fernando writes, is far too week to stand up to Chinese Communist pressure.

Trudeau, we recall, lamented the passing of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, “join[ing] the people of Cuba in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.” Similarly, Jagmeet Singh had this to say: “He saw a country wracked by poverty, illiteracy & disease. So he lead [sic] a revolution that uplifted the lives of millions. RIP #Fidel Castro.”

Trudeau’s approval rating has taken a hit of late but carrots count in moving the dray electorate forward. A new Angus Reid poll indicates where his strength lies province by province. Many Canadians are happy to allow the government to borrow hundreds of millions to subsidize their idleness with a monetary COVID response package, dubbed CERB (Canada Emergency Response Benefit), recently increased by 20 percent, rendering it difficult for many entrepreneurs and businesses to hire service personnel who relish living off the government dole.

Nevertheless, despite his many false promises, numerous scandals, proroguing of parliament for several months on the pretext of mitigating COVID, fiscal incontinence, 600 million dollar media bribe (sugar-coated as a “bailout”), and overall economic witlessness (“the budget will balance itself”), Trudeau’s carrots to select beneficiaries enable him to retain a considerable voting constituency and markedly improve his chances of re-election.

Indeed, The Liberal Party can count on an ample war chest. A recent special report here at The Pipeline demonstrated that, of the top ten third-party spenders that influenced the previous election, eight of them were leftist groups, outspending their rivals on the right by a factor of over 15 to 1. The CBC poll tracker indicates that the Conservatives are currently trailing the Liberals by 5 percentage points but, as the propaganda arm of the Liberals and favorite son Trudeau, its results should be met with a degree of skepticism.

Nonetheless, the Conservatives are likely no match for the combined electoral clout of the Left in this country. The cash-strapped, media bête noire, the People’s Party of Canada, is the best option for Canada’s (and Alberta’s) future, but it may not garner a single parliamentary seat—as was the case in the last election. This is to be expected. The Liberals may form a minority government once again, but with the NDP hitching a ride it would in any case be tantamount to a majority. Canada’s premier columnist Rex Murphy speculates, with considerable evidence, that Trudeau and Singh have formed “a (silent) concordat.”

Alberta had better get its act together before the Overton window closes. Alea iacta est.

Canada: Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

Last week I wrote about the fear among Democrats that the U.S. might be heading for a significant economic recovery before the election in November, such that the Trump campaign would be able to point to "the most explosive monthly employment numbers and gross domestic product growth ever" (in the words of Obama Administration senior advisor Jason Furman), and ride that good news to reelection. Well, yesterday morning we all woke up to news which suggests that that upward trajectory might be beginning. After months of catastrophe, with Great Depression-like unemployment figures, the May jobs report showed that the economy added 2.5 million jobs in that period, the most ever in a single month.

The news was so surprising that left-wing rags like the Washington Post had to frantically delete their pre-written tweets about how terrible the report was:

Of course, we aren't out of the woods yet. An unemployment rate of 13 percent is still pretty bad, even if things are heading in the right direction. And, as I argued last week, Joe Biden's willingness to squander our gains on his ideological program (or that of his advisors while he naps in the Lincoln Bedroom), including his announcement that he would definitively kill Keystone XL  pipeline upon entering the White House, should make us all wary about trusting him to save the economy.

Well, up in Canada we can see what it looks like to have people already in power whose instincts are invariably ordered toward ideology over job creation or the cost of living. We've already covered Trudeau's doubling the nation's carbon tax during the pandemic, a decision which ran counter to what basically every other nation in the world was doing. We also discussed his oil and gas aid package, which seemed ordered towards the end of an industry which accounts for roughly 10 percent of Canada's GDP.

This is the path Trudeau has committed his nation to, and it doesn't seem like it is going to slow down anytime soon. Dan McTeague, president of the indispensable Canadians for Affordable Energy, has been writing recently about the return of Justin Trudeau's college drinking buddy, Gerald Butts, who grew up to be an environmental activist, director of policy for then-Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, and eventually Trudeau's chief adviser. Butts, you may recall, was forced to resign in the run up to the 2019 election for his role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

Now that that election is over, McTeague reports that Butts is back in Ottawa serving on a new task force called Resilient Recovery. "The task force," explains McTeague, is "made up of green industry and environmental leaders [and] says its goal is to help seize a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity to build things in a “better” way post the COVID-19 pandemic." If you guessed that that means taking advantage of a crisis to get Canada even more entangled in the Green Energy industry than it already is and make it harder for oil and gas companies to operate, you win.

Butts: I'm ba-ack.

In the course of two articles, McTeague argues that Canadians should be aware of, and concerned by, this "green energy at any and all costs" task force, and especially by Butts' inclusion in it. Butts has the ear of the prime minister and a history of making life harder for Canadians. McTeague has taken the time to remind us of that history. In his first piece, he examines Butts' work in the McGuinty government in Ontario:

Gerry Butts is known as one of the architects of Dalton McGuinty’s disastrous Green Energy Act. The GEA hurt Ontarians (and is still hurting them), resulting in energy bills increasing by 70% from 2008 to 2016. Ontario’s claim to fame became its high energy rates - the highest in all of North America. Big manufacturers across the province began to flee for friendlier economic climates. Even former premier Kathleen Wynne said in her 2018 campaign that because of the Green Energy Act many families were having to choose between paying their energy bills and feeding their families.

The GEA originally promised the creation of 50,000 green energy jobs. The government later admitted that that number was not based on any formal analysis, that many of the jobs would be temporary, and that it did not account for the lost manufacturing jobs due to the increased energy prices. Wind and solar were incredibly expensive to produce... and the consumer was the one who had to make up the difference. How? Through a hidden tax euphemistically called the Global Adjustment Fee which suddenly started to appear on Ontario energy bills. A Global News article from 2016 stated that for every $100 in usage that appeared on your bill, $23 was actual electricity cost, while the other $77 was from the “Global Adjustment Fee”.

After a few years out of government, Butts jumped onboard the Trudeau train after the Liberals won their majority in 2015, and brought his wealth of experience making everyday life more expensive for Ontarians to Canadians more generally. That part of his career is covered in McTeague's second piece:

The costs of Butts’ climate agenda are apparent in the policies that the Trudeau government put in place during its first term, the most important (and destructive) of these being the carbon tax. It is no surprise that the mastermind behind the Ontario green energy debacle would help create expensive and ineffective policies at the federal level. The carbon tax adds at least 7 cents per litre of gas at the pump for Canadians. Because it applies to all energy sources, the hidden costs – on food and services and our competitiveness – will be even greater, and the carbon tax will increase annually by large increments.

Other expensive and anti-industry policies that were launched during Butts’ time in Ottawa include Bill C-69 (an overhaul of Canada's regulatory and resource project approval system) and C-48 (the oil tanker moratorium act). These have meant significant new and unnecessary regulatory burdens that restrict resource development, drive away investment, and have the effect of making energy more expensive.

Though Canada's May jobs numbers crept up somewhat, just like America's, Canada is still experiencing record unemployment. Bombardier just announced that they'ree laying off 2,500 workers. This is still a time of crisis, and for any recovery to be really resilient, it needs a laser focus on getting people back to work and getting the economy back on track. Gerald Butts' resumé speaks to the fact that he is more than willing to prioritize environmentalist virtue signalling over the benefit of ordinary Canadians.