Juno News - November 06, 2023


A carbon tax revolt is underway (ft. Kris Sims)

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Chris Sims Danielle Smith Pierre Poilievre Stephen Harper Scott Smoe Scott Moe Godspeed Quebecer Trudeau
Why the left is always wrong (ft. Dennis Prager) Canadian Anti-Hate Network won't look at left-wing hate

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

179.79

Word count

2,098

Sentence count

155

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling allowing provinces to opt out of the carbon tax on heating oil, the federal government is back at it again with a carbon tax that applies only to heating oil in certain areas of the country. In response, Premier Scott Moe has called for the government to extend the same exemption to all forms of home heating, not just heating oil.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Ideally, a government would represent the interests of all Canadians, not just Canadians
00:00:14.220 in liberal-held ridings. But what do I know about politics? Well, there is a bit of a silver lining
00:00:20.600 in this. I think that the government's messaging on this and the inconsistency has started a bit
00:00:26.400 of a rebellion. Scott Moe, the Premier of Saskatchewan, had this to say today.
00:00:32.620 As Premier, I cannot accept the federal government giving an affordability break to people in
00:00:38.140 one part of Canada, but not here. So today, I am calling on the federal government to offer the
00:00:44.180 same carbon tax exemption to Saskatchewan families by extending it to all forms of home heating,
00:00:50.360 not just heating oil. It's only fair to other Saskatchewan and Canadian families.
00:00:55.560 Hopefully, that exemption will be provided soon. But if not, effective January 1, Sask Energy
00:01:03.540 will stop collecting and submitting the carbon tax on natural gas, effectively providing Saskatchewan
00:01:10.420 residents with the very same exemption that the federal government is giving heating oil
00:01:14.520 in Atlantic Canada. The federal government may say that's illegal and that you simply cannot
00:01:20.400 choose to collect and pay your taxes. In most cases, I would agree with that. But it's the federal
00:01:27.600 government that has created two classes of taxpayer by providing an exemption for heating oil. An exemption
00:01:33.760 that really only applies in one part of the country and effectively excludes Saskatchewan.
00:01:39.440 As Premier, it's my job to ensure Saskatchewan residents are treated fairly and equally with our fellow
00:01:45.440 Canadians in other parts of the country. And that's what I am doing today.
00:01:49.280 Shots fired. Let's talk about this with our regular Monday correspondent, Chris Sims, who is the Alberta
00:01:58.560 Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris, that must have been music to your ears.
00:02:03.600 Yeah, it was really awesome. I'm just going to adjust my shot so I'm not literally standing in front of a garbage can for you.
00:02:09.200 So, all right. So there are better metaphors for Canadian politics. Actually, no, wait, there aren't.
00:02:14.400 So I'm here actually at the Edmonton Legislature because, of course, it's the throne speech.
00:02:19.760 So it's everybody's first day back at school, so to speak, here in Alberta. So, wow.
00:02:26.960 Hearing that from Premier Mo, can he do it? We don't know. We'll put it this way. Mo's heart is definitely
00:02:35.040 in the right place. And Trudeau here is definitely in the wrong. And boy, oh boy. I thought we'd already
00:02:42.560 seen enough of it last week, Andrew, when they said, oh, we're going to do a car vote. We're going
00:02:47.280 to do a suspension, but just for furnace oil. Who uses furnace oil? Almost, you know, exclusively folks
00:02:54.400 in Atlantic Canada. So they really stepped in it there. And then the Liberal Minister's like, no, wait,
00:03:00.960 there's more. But if you voted Liberal, we'd be nicer to you. Like, this is a dumpster fire for
00:03:07.040 this government. Yeah. I mean, there's so much to unpack there. Because if anyone followed along
00:03:13.760 with the carbon tax Supreme Court case and the cases before the Court of Appeal for Alberta and
00:03:19.040 Ontario, et cetera, the government's whole argument was that, no, no, no, climate change is national.
00:03:23.920 Greenhouse gas emissions are national. We can't let provinces come up with their own
00:03:28.160 local approach to this. We can't regionalize or provincialize this. And here's the federal
00:03:33.360 government doing that, saying, well, we're going to treat this differently in Atlantic Canada than
00:03:37.280 we are elsewhere, which undermines the government's whole approach, which is why I think Scott
00:03:42.240 Smoe may actually have at least a moral leg to stand on, a legal one we don't know yet.
00:03:48.320 Premier Danielle Smith, I haven't seen the clip, but I understand earlier she's talked about
00:03:52.240 reevaluating the Supreme Court case as well and in light of this. So it does sound like the
00:03:57.680 government here has really stepped in it. I mean, not even politically, possibly legally.
00:04:03.280 Yeah, exactly. So it was interesting to hear what Premier Smith had to say. So
00:04:07.440 in Saskatchewan, they have a Crown Corporation. So that's part of the government. So the Premier
00:04:12.560 there is able to say, hey, wing of government, arm of government, we want you to do this. Now, again,
00:04:18.720 this is legal federally. Godspeed. We don't know. We're leaving that up to the legal beagles.
00:04:24.880 But here in Alberta, it's a private power industry. So we have competing companies that offer private
00:04:31.680 power to different homes, etc. You get to choose and pick and choose. It's not like Alberta power.
00:04:37.120 So they don't have that ability. And she was very careful today when she answered her question. She
00:04:42.320 said, I wouldn't want to advise a private company to maybe go against the law. But she's looking at this
00:04:48.080 really hard with what's great about this, Andrew, is like you just said, all of a sudden, the Prime
00:04:53.760 Minister has to now admit that this isn't so much about the science, is it? It's about political science.
00:05:01.520 Yeah. And I think that's the other thing that they've undermined here, not just that this has
00:05:05.920 to be the same nationally, there has to be a one size fits all solution. But the government's other
00:05:11.040 argument was that this is so important, we can't offer anyone a reprieve, even on a temporary basis,
00:05:17.120 because you at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation have been calling on the government, the conservatives
00:05:21.760 have been calling on the government to offer a bit of a break with the cost of living crisis. Let's
00:05:26.320 just pull back on the carbon tax. Let's just stop the hikes of the carbon tax. And the government has
00:05:31.360 said no. And their argument has been no, no, no, climate change is so important. We can't do this.
00:05:36.160 This isn't about now. It's about 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And it is about right now,
00:05:41.200 if you're in Atlantic Canada and voted Liberal. Yes, exactly. And so we've been in the game for a
00:05:46.880 long time. This is so obvious. Like, it's really obvious. The fact that they singled out just furnace
00:05:54.320 oil. Okay, so around three or 4% of Canadian households use furnace oil or heating oil for their
00:06:02.560 homes. Of that three or 4%, the vast majority of those homes are in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia,
00:06:09.840 Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, a little bit in New Brunswick, but not quite as much.
00:06:14.240 Yes, there are some isolated folks up in the north of Ontario and up north, maybe across the west,
00:06:19.520 a little tiny bit, but not usually. Usually it's furnace oil for the Maritimes in Atlantic Canada
00:06:25.840 and natural gas for those of us here across the west and mostly in Ontario as well. What's getting me
00:06:31.600 here too, Andrew, is that there's a whole lot of seats around the 905 and around your area there
00:06:38.480 of Ontario. They use natural gas. Like, what are they, chopped liver? Like, what message are they
00:06:44.800 sending to all of those Liberal seats there in Ontario? But what the big win here is, is that now
00:06:50.880 the Prime Minister has had to admit, one, this is unaffordable. Two, apparently this isn't the big
00:06:57.600 honking crisis that he said it was going to be because he's willing to suspend the usage of a
00:07:03.520 carbon tax on a much more heavier particulate burning fuel for the next three years until after
00:07:11.040 the next election. That's the obvious part here. Why did he give a timeline on it? It just made it even
00:07:16.960 worse. Yeah, I think that is in and of itself there too. And I wonder if this is looking at some
00:07:24.240 of the polling and seeing Atlantic Canada as wavering of it. I mean, Pierre Polyev had been,
00:07:29.920 I think, doing a rally that night that this announcement came out in Atlantic Canada. Now,
00:07:35.520 I don't think Atlantic voters are so stupid as to be hoodwinked by a very temporary promise. I mean, 0.99
00:07:41.760 by a government, it's basically the can you stop hitting me thing and then a person stops hitting
00:07:47.200 you and you don't just thank them, you know, in the grand scheme of things. You're like, okay,
00:07:51.200 well, thank you for stopping. But I'm not going to forget that you were the guy doing that in the
00:07:54.560 first place. And that's really what's happening here. And I mean, look, I'm not telling anyone
00:07:59.040 how to vote. But I do think for Atlantic Canadians, they're probably not going to forget that this
00:08:05.040 reprieve was not really offered to them till now. And all of these increases, the addition of the
00:08:09.360 carbon tax was entirely the doing of the feds in the first place. Yes, exactly. I think most folks in
00:08:15.680 that area will remember that only when all of those facts and safe seats in Atlantic Canada
00:08:22.400 were suddenly tanking in the polls, all of a sudden, the politicians got really into listening
00:08:27.520 to people. It was just miraculous. See, this is what we try to say at the Canadian Taxpayers
00:08:32.080 Federation. If you want to make change happen, go right after your member of parliament and say so.
00:08:38.720 And if they don't listen to you, that's when you say, you know what, next time, the next election,
00:08:44.160 I'm going to get a group of 10 friends together. And I'm going to door knock against you in your
00:08:48.320 writing on this issue. You get their attention real fast. Why? Because it's their butts on the
00:08:54.320 line this time. So that cabinet minister who said, Oh, well, maybe you should elect more liberals and 0.67
00:08:58.880 we'll actually listen to you on something as unaffordable and unfair as the carbon tax.
00:09:02.880 Whoa, all of a sudden, her salary of 200 something thousand dollars with all expenses paid for travel
00:09:09.680 and food and home heating, by the way, that's suddenly in peril. And that gets their attention
00:09:15.840 real fast. So this is really clear. What we're happy about is now, finally, finally, at the federal
00:09:23.040 level, the crack is there, the crack is breaking, and they're realizing that the carbon tax is
00:09:28.320 unaffordable. And it doesn't it doesn't fix the environmental issues.
00:09:31.680 Yeah, and I always like doing the flip on political stories and say, you know,
00:09:37.040 what would I think if this were reversed? What would the critics think? And I was kind of imagining
00:09:41.120 this fantasy scenario of some Quebecer in, you know, 2013 makes a comment about the federal
00:09:46.320 government. And Stephen Harper just glibly says, Well, if you want to be heard, you got to elect
00:09:50.400 conservatives like there would be outrage on that. I mean, now that I say it, I'm like, I would kind
00:09:55.600 of be amused in that context. But that doesn't mean it's the responsible thing to do when people are
00:10:00.400 hurting. And that's really what the government is saying here. And like, again, if Pierre
00:10:04.080 Pauliev said that to some suburban Toronto voter, well, if you want anything, you should have voted
00:10:09.200 for me like that. That's not prime ministerial. No. And in fact, one of the first things whenever
00:10:15.360 there's somebody elected, okay, a premier, a prime minister, it doesn't matter what party,
00:10:20.880 you've been watching this game long enough, you know this, one of the first things out of their
00:10:24.720 mouth is they say, while I was elected by this percentage of Albertans or Canadians,
00:10:30.400 I will be the premier, I will be the prime minister for all of you. That flies in the face
00:10:37.280 of what that cabinet minister just said. Like, that was a huge misstep. But what's good about
00:10:43.920 this misstep, and everybody's human, so they screwed up. Yep. What's good about this misstep is now
00:10:49.360 this message of the carbon tax is unaffordable, and it doesn't fix emissions issues anyway. So why are we
00:10:56.080 paying for it? Why are we punishing Canadians for staying warm in winter in Canada? It is not right.
00:11:03.360 Scrap it for everyone everywhere across Canada. That's becoming the dominant message now even in
00:11:09.120 Ottawa, which is excellent. It's a long time coming, but it needs to happen. Well, we'll see if this
00:11:15.280 starts a bit of a ripple effect across the country here, the Prairie Rebellion, I guess we can call
00:11:21.600 it. Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation joining us live from the Alberta Legislature in
00:11:27.280 Edmonton. Always a pleasure, Chris. We will chat with you next Monday. You betcha. Thanks for
00:11:31.840 listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.