The Conservatives want to make carbon pricing the “ballot box issue” in the next election, banking on Canadians’ concerns about the cost of living and seeing a crack in the Liberals’ armor when it comes to fighting carbon pricing. climate changes.
“An election on the carbon tax,” proposed leader Pierre Poilievre on Wednesday morning in a speech to his caucus in Ottawa.
Mr. Poilievre also said Wednesday that he intended to present a motion in the Commons for the government to extend the exemption to all modes of home heating until the next election. And he hopes that during this election, Canadians will be asked to decide whether they want federal pricing to be reapplied to fuels.
“I want to make a deal with him,” Mr. Poilievre said of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. “We all know that we are not going to agree on the carbon tax: he wants to increase it, I want to remove it, we all know that. We agree on that. »
The Liberals announced last week that the government would suspend federal pricing on home heating oil for three years, to give Canadians who use this fuel more time and money to replace it with an electric heat pump.
The Liberal government is also doubling the top-up rebate amount paid to rural Canadians, recognizing that they have fewer options to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. Ottawa is finally expanding a program that helps Canadians buy a heat pump.
The announcement was not well received, particularly in Western Canada, where the majority of households use natural gas to heat their homes — and therefore will not benefit from the reprieve linked to fuel oil alone.
The Liberals argue that this decision takes into account the current price of home heating oil compared to other fuels, and that it also takes into account the people most likely to use it.
“Home heating oil costs more than other forms of heating, and home heating oil is used disproportionately by low-income Canadians in rural areas of the country who need more support,” the Prime Minister explained Wednesday. Trudeau.
“Unfortunate” remarks from the minister
The Liberals also now point out that although a greater proportion of Canadians in the Atlantic provinces rely on home heating oil for heating, only a quarter of home oil users live in that region of the country — they argue that 40% live in the Quebec, 20% in Ontario and 10% in Western Canada.
However, this argument was undermined on Sunday when the Minister of Rural Economic Development and Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Gudie Hutchings, suggested that this decision was in response to pressure from an imposing Liberal caucus from of the Atlantic provinces.
In an interview on CTV’s public affairs program “Question Period”, Minister Hutchings suggested that if Western Canadians wanted to have more influence in Ottawa, they should elect more Liberal MPs.
Nova Scotia Liberal MP Kody Blois called Hutchings’ comments “unfortunate.” He said Wednesday that these comments wrongly suggest that the suspension benefits Atlantic Canada more, while three-quarters of a million Canadians outside this region use home heating oil.
But the Conservative leader jumped on the minister’s remarks to prove that the Liberals are using carbon pricing as a punitive measure, not as a measure to fight climate change.
The Conservative leader accused Mr. Trudeau last Thursday of making an about-face on this issue — and of admitting by partially suspending it that this federal measure was costly for Canadians, who are struggling with a rising cost of living.
Justin Trudeau, for his part, seems impatient to do battle with Mr. Poilievre in the fight against climate change.
“I think Canadians are deeply concerned about the need to continue to fight climate change in a way that makes life more affordable for them,” the Liberal leader said Wednesday morning.
“This is what we are doing and it is absolutely something that I will continue to advocate unequivocally, while Mr. Poilievre has no plan to combat climate change and therefore no plan for the economy. »