During an interview with Mario Dumont, Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, proclaimed that the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, “became Trudeau’s valet” because he supported the government Liberal during a motion of no confidence on the carbon tax and the clean fuels regulation. He adds that “it will increase the cost of gasoline by 20 cents per liter.”
Accusing the government in place of all the evils of the earth is fair game in the partisan political game; inflation, fuel costs, floods, droughts, forest fires, housing crisis, it’s all “Trudeau’s fault”! But, as a very Quebec expression says, “push, but push equals”!
How on earth would a federal carbon tax, non-existent in Quebec (and British Columbia), “increase the cost of gasoline by 20 cents per liter” in Quebec?
Of course, we can criticize Mr. Trudeau’s government for many things, including its purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline and its intention to triple its capacity. This mishap cost taxpayers more than $35 billion.
It takes an imaginative capacity almost equal to that of Mr. Poilievre to assert that the possible sale of this white elephant would be used to finance the decarbonization of the Canadian economy. Moreover, all subsidies for fossil fuels increase our tax burden and, above all, delay the implementation of effective measures to reduce the importance of climate change.
No offense to Mr. Poilievre, the problem is not the carbon tax; the problem is climate change. The year 2023 has imposed all kinds of extreme weather conditions on the inhabitants of the planet: extraordinary scorching temperatures, accelerated melting of the ice caps of the two poles and the Andean glaciers, droughts, forest fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. .
According to the World Meteorological Organization, this year has broken all records; the “red alert” has sounded! What concerns scientists is that they do not understand why their predictions, based on computer simulations, fall short of observed reality.
Political dinosaurs
This terrifying climate reality should be front-page news across all media outlets. However, we are only talking about the Conservative motion of censure regarding the federal carbon tax. In fact, 8 out of 10 targeted families receive a government rebate greater than the higher cost of their fuel. However, Mr. Poilievre says nothing about it!
This federal tax is only imposed in provinces that are governed by political dinosaurs who refuse to deal with climate reality.
Quebec has its Carbon Exchange while British Columbia has its own tax. As a result, the federal carbon tax does not apply there, since these two provinces are governed according to climate “common sense” which escapes Mr. Poilievre. Even if the energy and economic policies of these two provinces are far from adequately responding to the climate emergency, the taxation and carbon credit trading mechanisms that they have put in place constitute coherent progress in terms of decarbonization.
We cannot blame Mr. Blanchet for supporting the timid federal tax which applies only in the eight recalcitrant provinces. And then, Mr. Poilievre should explain to us in a clear, logical and rational manner how a non-existent tax in Quebec could increase the “cost of gasoline by 20 cents per liter”. The unhealthy obsession of this candidate for the post of Prime Minister with a fictitious federal tax shows us to what extent he is an obscurantist obsessed with the imaginary world of nice fossil fuels.