With most Canadians against carbon tax hike, Trudeau plays defence - "A Leger poll conducted for the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation asked the simple question, “Do you support or oppose the federal government increasing the carbon tax?” A very strong majority (69%) said they opposed the tax hike, while 31% said they supported it. So what will Trudeau do come April 1? He’s going to ignore the popular will of the people, he’s going to ignore the stated desires of the majority of provinces, and he will increase the tax by 23% — from $65 to $80 a tonne. Trudeau said recently that it’s not his job to be popular; he’s doing well at that part."
The carbon tax was never worth the cost - "the current level of the carbon tax is very likely already too high compared to the net costs of greenhouse gas emissions; it has been implemented in the most inefficient way possible; emissions are a global problem and Canada by itself can make a negligible contribution to reducing emissions; and the carbon tax is hurting the competitiveness of Canadian companies in domestic and foreign markets. Understanding the reasoning for these conclusions means being able to make informed decisions at the ballot box and informed criticisms of proposed policies... it is very difficult to reduce some types of emissions (think heating a house with a heat pump using renewable electricity in -20 degrees Celsius weather with no sun and no wind). Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Institute, has calculated, using one of the UN’s own models, that all policies from the Paris Agreement would “likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17 degrees Celsius in 2100,” an impact which would be imperceptible. The conclusion must be that the net zero goal is suboptimal. The only economist to win a Nobel prize for work in environmental economics, William Nordhaus of Yale University, argued that a target of 3.5 degrees would balance costs and benefits and that doing nothing at all would be better than trying to hit a target of 1.5 degrees. Rather than attempting more than a very modest mitigation of temperature increases, adaptation to warming is better... Almost all estimates of the social cost take into account only the predicted harmful effects of CO2 (using models that have systematically overstated its warming effects). They neglect the well-established positive impact of CO2 on plant growth, which has led to a greening of the earth and an increase in agricultural productivity estimated to be worth over $3 trillion between 1961 and 2011. A recent study of the social cost of CO2 accounts for this effect and gives a range of estimates lower than the current carbon tax—and in some cases, the estimated social costs are actually negative. If this is indeed the case, then the argument follows that we should be subsidizing rather than taxing the use of fossil fuels. Regardless, though, if the goal is to efficiently reduce emissions, the carbon tax should be used alone. Piling on other taxes, subsidies, regulations, and controls increases the cost of cutting emissions because they introduce distortions into the operation of markets. The current policy mix has many of these, including but not limited to mandates on zero-emission vehicles, massive subsidies for the production of batteries for electric vehicles, carbon tax exemptions for heating oil but not for other types of home heating, total bans on some uses of plastic, etc. It almost seems guaranteed to maximize the cost of reducing emissions. If greenhouse gases are a problem, they’re a global problem. Canada can do nothing by itself to solve it. If the Canadian economy were to disappear tomorrow, the increase in emissions from China, which is building two new coal-fired power plants per week, would more than makeup for the elimination of Canadian emissions within months. The Climate Tracker Action organization assesses that in February 2024 no countries are meeting their Paris Agreement targets. Many countries (including Canada) are either “highly” or “critically” insufficient. If going it alone is futile, the carbon tax is punishing Canadian firms in an important way. It hurts their competitiveness with imports from firms that face a lower carbon tax and when exporting to markets served by those firms. It is possible (but administratively costly) to implement border adjustments that tax the imports from jurisdictions with a lower carbon tax, and which wholly or partially exempt the tax on exports to such jurisdictions. There have been discussions about implementing these adjustments, but so far they have not borne fruit. The bottom line: pause increases in the carbon tax permanently and have a serious discussion about eliminating the hodgepodge of rules and regulations that are harming the efficiency and competitiveness of the Canadian economy."
The "Trust the Science" crowd think economics is make believe, so they don't care about cost-benefit analysis, just virtue signalling
Greece is the latest ally to be disappointed in Canada due to Trudeau - "While Mitsotakis said that he is very interested in obtaining LNG at competitive prices, the Trudeau Liberals have shown they aren’t interested in selling Canada’s LNG resources. It comes down to a matter of political philosophy, and the Liberal view is that Canada should not do anything that could increase our greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, exporting LNG, especially to places still burning fuels such coal for electrical generation, would lower global emissions even if Canada’s rose slightly. Natural gas produces about half the greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal when used to generate electricity. Canada could be exporting LNG to Europe, China, India and other regions where coal is still a major source of electricity production and in doing so, significantly decrease global emissions. The Trudeau Liberals have not only refused to accept this idea, but they have also openly mocked it. At a recent speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre noted a study that concluded if Canada was shipping LNG to India to convert their coal plants to gas, it would be the same as eliminating all of Canada’s emissions for four years. “We have clean hydroelectricity and cold weather, which allows us to liquefy it with 25% less energy than is used in the United States of America,” Poilievre said... Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been pressure on Canada to move quickly to export LNG to replace Russian natural gas. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is funding his war of aggression against Ukraine using his profits from oil and gas exports. Trudeau has remained steadfast even as allies such as Japan and Germany have come to Canada seeking assistance."
Virtue signalling strikes again, even if it makes the world a worse place.
The Weekly Wrap: The Liberals abandon the centre - "the commentator’s arguments about the Conservatives weren’t the most interesting or notable part of his tweet. It was his extraordinary claim that Canadian Liberal politics are only marginally different (“shifted to the Left to an extent”) than they were in the recent past. That thesis, which already seemed self-evidently wrong, was actually put to the test by this week’s parliamentary vote on an NDP motion concerning the Israel-Hamas war. That only three Liberal MPs voted against abandoning a major ally as it responds to a devastating terrorist attack and tries to recover its citizens who’ve now been held hostage for nearly 170 days is a rather forceful rebuttal. How else can one interpret it but as a radical shift in the centre of gravity of Liberal politics in Canada?... The whole episode conjures in my mind the life and career of Charles Krauthammer, the great McGill-educated, American newspaper columnist, who went from writing speeches for Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale to becoming one of the most important conservative public intellectuals of the past half-century. When asked about his intellectual and political journey, Krauthammer used to invoke Ronald Reagan’s famous line: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. It left me.”... The Liberal Party’s own ideological transformation over the past decade or so has followed the opposite path of Krauthammer’s. It started with domestic policy where its abandonment of balanced budgets, single-minded focus on equity over economic efficiency, and full-throated embrace of identity politics signaled a major break from the past. The Trudeau-era Liberal Party no longer has room for past Liberal stalwarts like John Manley, Martha Hall-Findley, or more recently Bill Morneau. This week’s parliamentary vote showed that these trends have since moved to foreign policy. From a historical ally to withholding arms from Israel as it fights to protect itself from an existential threat, this is no longer our grandparents’ Liberal Party. It’s certainly not MP Anthony Housefather’s party. Housefather, who’s also a McGill graduate, told reporters following the vote that “a line had been crossed.” He’s since indicated that he’s contemplating his political future as a result."
Canadians no longer take geopolitics seriously—and our neglect is going to cost us - "More than any time in living memory, Ottawa looks completely lost in the world. Its foreign initiatives are disjointed and driven by domestic politics, its adversaries view it as petulant and weak, and, perhaps worst of all, its allies and partners are losing confidence in its capabilities and commitments. The global order is changing rapidly, and Canada seems unwilling or unable to adapt... The last official update of Canadian foreign policy was released in 2005, and Ottawa hasn’t published a national security strategy since 2004."
Tristin Hopper on X - "LIBERAL/NDP GOVERNMENT: *looks at public health system so broken that patients are routinely dying in hallways*
"The government should ALSO be in charge of dental care, housing and groceries ... and what if we started jailing people for 'misinformation'?""
The left wing solution is even more money
Norman Spector on X: "TRUDEAU'S PREPARING FOR THE WORST
Trudeau Admits He Does Not Understand Basic Math - "In an old video that has resurfaced from Justin Trudeau’s days as a West Point Great Academy teacher, the now prime minister admitted that he struggles with basic math. “I have a slight learning disability…that was never addressed,” the 29-year-old teacher stated. “I am dysnumeric,” Trudeau said after self-diagnosing why he cannot understand small math problems. Trudeau said that his learning disability did not prevent him from later teaching children mathematics. “Dysnumeric” is not a medical term, although there are learning disorders involving numbers. Trudeau admitted he could not remember phone numbers. He said that he was still unsure of his multiplication tables. Ironically, Trudeau says, “Questioning as a skill is not taught anymore.” Perhaps it is so that tyrants like Trudeau can invoke martial law over a peaceful protest and shriek at people to stay inside and trust the ever-changing “science.” Feasibly his revelation explains why he thought only a “fringe minority” of Canadians wanted to escape his COVID restrictions. He goes on to say that he also does not understand computers, but that his skill is teaching the youth how to think. “It’s not about teaching facts anymore,” he admitted years ago. It is about manipulating the people to trust what government claims is factual and implementing penalties for anyone who questions the status quo. It is no wonder that Schwab scooped Trudeau up to be one of his Young Leaders."
ArriveCan contractor made $2.5M for 10 hours' work per week - "A partner at GC Strategies told a parliamentary committee that his two-person firm, after taxes and expenses, made $2.5 million for less than 10 hours of clerical work per week"
The Weekly Wrap: Trudeau's legacy is a truly changed Canada - "The government outsourced the development of the mobile application to GC Strategies without evidence that the two-person company had much capacity or expertise or even requiring that it first submit a proposal. It then itself outsourced app development to various sub-contractors to actually perform the work... It mustn’t be forgotten that the app which was used for roughly two years didn’t function well either. It was the subject of 177 updates (which amounted to one every five days) including one in June 2022 that caused 10,000 travelers to be wrongly instructed to quarantine. The upshot: we paid far too much to companies who were unqualified to develop a mobile application, and they predictably produced a poor-quality one that caused a lot of problems for the government and Canadians... I previously worked in Ottawa for more than five years, including in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Department of Finance. My experience was marked by the typical frustrations of working in the government, including multiple layers of signoffs, various stages of approvals, and ongoing Treasury Board scrutiny. We were often told that these laborious processes were an annoying yet necessary insurance cost against such spectacular failures. In light of those various bureaucratic checks, it’s hard to understand how something that so self-evidently failed the principle of “value for money” and quite likely crossed into the realm of outright criminality could have gotten through the system. It should have been killed at various stages of review and approval. The RCMP’s own investigation may determine why that didn’t happen. But the present facts don’t indicate that sophisticated corruption was a key factor here. The only people who seemingly got rich off the scandal are the two principals at GC Strategies. The real story seems both less salacious and satisfying than one might expect. It mostly appears to be a story of low-grade incompetence. The implications for the government are in some ways worse than if corruption had been the cause... Market failure, in other words, must be assessed against the rather high possibility that a government intervention will produce its own failures that could be bigger and more damaging than the problem that it’s trying to solve. The ArriveCan app is a case in point. The main lesson of the week therefore ought to be a hit of reality for those inclined to an idealized view of government action...
FIRST READING: Canada is becoming a globally recognized lesson in what not to do - "the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police.” The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete.” This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world... on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario. It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West.” “Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views. The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology. Canada now has the world’s most liberalized assisted suicide regime, and the world’s highest rate of deaths attributable to euthanasia. Canada was the first country to go all-in on supervised consumption as a response to rising overdose rates, and B.C. is the first jurisdiction to distribute free recreational opioids under the rubric of “safer supply.” And in just the last few years, Canada’s rules governing transgender identity have been pushed even further than equivalent policies across much of Europe. As one example, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was forced to resign last year in part due to controversy that her government had allowed convicted rapists to secure transfer to women’s prisons simply by self-identifying as female. Trudeau enacted the exact same policy in 2018 – and with the same effect that it allowed sex offenders to transfer to women’s prison. Nevertheless, the issue has gone almost unremarked in Canadian discourse. The thrust of Canada’s Woke Nightmare is that this “social revolution” has mostly been to the country’s detriment, and should be heeded by Western nations looking to follow the same path. The U.K. is currently studying a proposal to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. And during Parliamentary hearings, it was Canada that was presented as the example of what to avoid. “I would say that Canada is a warning sign for countries that legalize medical assistance in dying,” Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto bioethicist, told a U.K. committee last June. The phrase “warning to the world” was also used in a recent profile on Canadian euthanasia published in the magazine Spiked. “Rather than tackle the health and economic challenges Canadian society is facing, the government is effectively offering an early death as a solution to life’s ills,” it read... “Canadians made the mistake of taking free speech for granted,” wrote Jivani of the Online Streaming Act, which enforced Canadian content quotas on sites ranging from Netflix to social media. Even beyond the political realm, aspects of the Canadian economy have gone so beyond the pale that they are now the international benchmark for what can go wrong. That’s most true of housing, with Canada often topping charts for the most “unaffordable” shelter or the most “bubbly” real estate market. Last November, Business Insider profiled the Canadian housing crisis for the singular purpose of warning Americans not to let their own housing market get as bad... If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed. While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide,” and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime. The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime.” Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is.”"
Trudeau Demands Life In Prison For Speech Crimes - "the government spokesperson went on to confirm the shocking truth about the legislation, which is that it would put people in prison for life for things they’ve said, specifically, “advocating genocide.”... someone who writes something that a government official decides is “advocating genocide” will face a longer maximum sentence than someone who rapes a child. And what might count as “advocating genocide”? Today, there are prominent politicians around the world who say that supporters of Israel are advocating the genocide of the Palestinian people and that supporters of Hamas are advocating genocide against Jewish people. Imagine if they were in power. Under Trudeau’s legislation, would they not be able to send their political enemies to prison for life?"
The Weekly Wrap: It’s time to have the private health-care conversation - "The Hub published an article this week by the Business Council of Canada CEO Goldy Hyder that warned about growing rumours that the government is considering an excess profits (or “windfall”) tax on large corporations... The negative effects of such a policy in terms of employment, investment, and wages could be significant. A report last year for the European Parliament for instance warned that windfall taxes can create big distortions—particularly in a globalized economy. The result could be a lot of economic damage without much revenue upside. The same goes for the persistent rumour that the government is thinking about using the budget to signal a new wealth tax that would draw an outstanding NDP proposal and popular thinking within progressive circles. One estimate is that such a tax could generate as much as $30 billion in federal revenues—though it must be said that these estimates depend on high “exit taxes” and even the imposition of strict capital controls. A wealth tax on high net-worth individuals would thus face broadly similar economic problems as a windfall tax on corporations. There are also some technical challenges that cannot be overstated. But technocratic arguments against these proposals sort of miss the point. The government won’t move forward with them based on economic or fiscal considerations—it’s not like the Trudeau government is now suddenly concerned about deficits after effectively doubling the national debt. The true motivation here would be to use tax policy to precipitate class conflict in our politics. Its main political purpose is to effectively wedge Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives into defending large corporations and wealthy Canadians. This isn’t evidence-based policy or high-minded idealism. It’s cynical politics and naked populism. It may not be as politically propitious as the government might think either. Although polls indicate that Canadians generally favour higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, there’s also compelling evidence that people are more concerned about fairness than equality. They’re even prepared to live with higher levels of inequality if they’re satisfied that the economy is fundamentally meritocratic rather than tilted in favour of certain companies or individuals. It’s possible therefore for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives to be strongly in favour of eliminating foreign ownership restrictions or tax preferences that disproportionately benefit high-income earners or other measures that would level the playing field when it comes to the market’s distribution of income and wealth and still oppose these potential tax hikes which are ultimately about leveling outcomes rather than enhancing fairness. If next month’s budget contains some combination of windfall and wealth taxes, Conservatives shouldn’t take the bait. They should call it out for what it is: a desperate move that won’t do anything to help Canadians because that’s not the point."
Polls show ‘across-the-board, generalized retreat’ from Liberals, says Coletto - "Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, told The Hill Times that drilling down beyond the top line numbers in his polling shows the Liberals are struggling “across the board”—through nearly all regions, issues, and demographics—and there is “no evidence” right now that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) can be the one to turn it around... 72 per cent of Canadians ranked cost of living as one of their top three issues. Among that group of voters, 37 per cent said they view the Conservative Party as the best to handle that issue, 18 per cent picked the NDP, and only 13 per cent chose the Liberal Party. The second and third top ranked issues were housing affordability and health care, and the Liberals were also running in third among those voters. “I think the conclusion has to be that they have to be fundamentally different,” said Coletto, regarding how the Liberals need to address these findings in the wake of the Durham byelection. The election of Jamil Jivani with 57 per cent of the vote—11 points better than the Conservative’s results in that riding in 2021—was widely seen as confirming the trends showing up in opinion polls... Alex Marland, a political scientist at Acadia University and the author of Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control, told The Hill Times that a change in leadership was a natural option for the party to consider at this point. “Leaders and parties are so synonymous with one another that we kind of forget that the party always has primacy over the leader—that the party will be enduring and will outlast the leader, and especially the Liberal Party,” said Marland, adding that at the moment, the Liberal and Trudeau brands are “incredibly synonymous in people’s minds.” “So the question ultimately becomes, at what point do the interests of the party trump the interests of the leader,” he said. “As you get closer to an election—as there are more sort of data points that indicate that there’s a problem—then we should anticipate that there will be more frustration.”"
In the 'game of margins,’ gender identity issue could become Trudeau's ‘Achilles heel’ in next election, say political players - "When the movement of a few thousand votes nationally could decide the election outcome, gender identity could prove to be an “Achilles heel” for the Liberals in the next federal election, especially within ethnic communities that are socially conservative and that are key part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party base, say political insiders... the gender identity and trans rights issue may not be a defining issue in the next election, but it could dampen the enthusiasm of some minority communities, such as Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Chinese, and Eastern European immigrant communities that tend to be socially conservative, and that have previously voted for Trudeau (Papineau, Que.)."
The Election Act provides for elections on the third Monday in October every four years. Under the law and rules known to everyone, the next elections were to be held on October 20, 2025. Except there's a “catch”. The 2019 elections (which were called early) were held on October 21 that year. This poses a small problem for MPs, because they get a pension for life after six full years... the election would be held a day too early for those who were elected in 2019. By proposing to change the date of the next elections from October 20 to 27, 2025, Trudeau is guaranteeing a lifetime pension to all MPs elected in the 2019 elections. A pension to which they would not be entitled if he followed the rules. On the sly, without any warning, Trudeau is trying to stack the deck. The Liberals pretend this change of date is due to the religious festival of Diwali... It's a funny argument, because they could just as easily have brought the elections forward rather than postpone them. Moreover, during the last election, they argued that citizens whose religious festival was held at the same time as the vote simply had to take advantage of advance voting! This maneuver reveals everything about the state of mind of Trudeau and his gang. They fear the worst and, based on the polls at least, they are right. There is nothing more important in politics than the confidence of the leader and Trudeau, let's be clear, has never lacked confidence in himself. This is the first time I've seen him prepare for a defeat. This will quickly be decoded by his own troops, the very ones he is, on the contrary, trying to help by being considerate with regard to their pensions."
Guilbeault seems to live in another virtual realm in which motor vehicles—including hybrid or electric ones—aren’t going to be a key part of Canada’s transportation future. Outside of the country’s major cities, the idea that public transportation can become a significant or even the dominant mode of transportation is an ideological fantasy. It’s similarly fantastical to think that we can somehow fully substitute the 77 percent of the volume of goods that are shipped across the country by truck. These faulty assumptions reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the interaction between basic economics and Canada’s unique geography. They’re such radical ideas, in fact, that they bring into question Guilbeault’s entire understanding of climate policy in the Canadian context. They also involve a high degree of cognitive dissonance. His government has mandated the transition to electric vehicles by 2035. It has also already spent billions of dollars to subsidize production in Canada... It’s the sort of unserious thinking that actually does harm to the practicalities of a durable and successful climate change agenda. It also exposes the inherent problems of appointing a hard-core ideologue to lead the file in the first place... His radicalism may resonate with his fellow activists but, as we’ve seen in recent days, it’s ultimately counterproductive for his own cause...
only 3 percent of Canadians believe that Justin Trudeau’s ongoing leadership of the Liberal Party is in the party’s interest is a virtually unprecedented public indictment of a sitting party leader. At this point, only some combination of delusion and ego would cause the prime minister and party members to not seriously consider replacing him before the next federal election... Trudeau’s large-scale spending on child care, climate change, health care, housing, and other files has reshaped the federal government’s fiscal trajectory by effectively locking his successors into dedicating scarce resources to his progressive priorities and in turn narrowing the options for tax cuts or other conservative policy preferences. Unless he’s prepared to assume great political risk, a Pierre Poilievre-led government will preside over a fiscal framework established by Justin Trudeau. The net result: Ottawa will be permanently bigger than it was before the latter became prime minister. The same goes for the broader political culture. Although causality and correlation are hard to judge, it’s clear that Trudeau has presided over the flowering of identity politics in our major institutions including big business, universities, the news media, and the government itself. Gender pronouns, race-based hiring and promotion, and culture wars over questions of human sexuality weren’t really part of the pre-2015 mainstream debate. They are today. Even if Trudeau didn’t originate these trends, he certainly helped to precipitate them. One might even (somewhat facetiously) argue that one of the biggest exports during his time in office is Jordan Peterson who first rose to prominence based on his opposition to Bill C-17 (tabled in May 2016 and passed in June 2017) which added gender identity and expression as protected grounds under the Canadian Human Rights Act."
