Jim Karahalios, founder of Axe the Carbon Tax, joins me to talk about the fight against the federal carbon tax, and why it's a good idea to have a carbon tax in the first place.
00:00:00.880Welcome to another True North talk. I've covered a fair bit in recent months, the fight against the federal carbon tax, a fight that's taking place in courts in Ontario, Saskatchewan, soon to be Alberta.
00:00:14.460We have New Brunswick as well that's been joining these fights.
00:00:17.760And despite the ruling that came out from the Saskatchewan court that the carbon tax is constitutional, there's another dimension to this,
00:00:26.340which is that if politically it becomes untenable to do it, the legal analysis is pretty irrelevant.
00:00:33.100But I want to talk about this in both contexts here.
00:00:35.320Very pleased to welcome Jim Karahalios, who is the founder of Axe the Carbon Tax, which you can get at axthecarbontax.ca.
00:00:43.160Jim, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:00:45.700Hey, Andrew. Thanks for having me on. It's always good to talk to you.
00:00:48.180I want to go back to the beginning here because I think that as much as this battle is characterized as being left versus right,
00:00:55.740that really wasn't the start of Axe the Carbon Tax.
00:00:59.280Tell me how this came about for people that aren't in Ontario.
00:01:03.000Well, if you remember back in 2017, we had Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown,
00:01:08.680who won the leadership of the PC party in Ontario against carbon taxes and kind of like a fiscal conservative.
00:01:15.240And then he came out and shocked everyone at his first convention, said he was actually in favor of a carbon tax.
00:01:21.220At the same time, Brian Pallister, the newly elected PC Manitoba premier, he also came out and said he was going to put a carbon tax.
00:01:31.860And with the with those two conservative provincial leaders and especially Patrick Brown,
00:01:37.460it kind of paved the way for Justin Trudeau to say he was going to impose it.
00:01:41.400Because if you remember, in 2015, Trudeau said he was going to work cooperatively.
00:01:45.400And then as soon as Brown said he was going to bring it in a few months later, Trudeau changed gears and said he was going to mandate a carbon tax across the country.
00:01:55.700So I thought it paved the way, you know, the liberals depend on Ontario seats.
00:01:59.160So I started the Axe to Carbon Tax campaign because it's really a defining issue for conservatives to kind of get Patrick Brown and Brian Pallister.
00:02:09.380We actually started the campaign in Manitoba to change their mind on a carbon tax and oppose a carbon tax,
00:02:15.440just like our federal conservative party and most of the candidates running in that.
00:02:20.100It was supposed to be kind of like this, quote unquote, inside baseball policy discussion for conservatives.
00:02:25.080The whole thing blew out of proportion when Patrick Brown and the PC Party executive threw me out of the party,
00:02:32.920denied me entrance into their convention and sued me.
00:02:36.360All three of those, I think, are a first for the PC Party of Ontario.
00:02:39.960Certainly there hasn't been a political party that sued anyone before or denied them access to a convention.
00:02:45.800And I beat their lawsuit in court in six weeks as a decision by a judge that saw through it as an attempt to kind of shut me down.
00:03:04.660And we went into a general election campaign in Ontario where really the only campaign promise that Doug kept going back to was to scrap the carbon tax.
00:03:12.280And he ended up scrapping the cap and trade carbon tax.
00:03:15.220And I think that was the domino or the trigger for conservative leaders across the country to really take a second look at either being in favor of a carbon tax or being quiet on it.
00:03:27.620And we see now this national debate on the carbon tax that's going into the federal election.
00:03:32.520Conservatives have always been the ones fighting against taxes.
00:03:36.860I mean, whether they do it effectively or not is a different story.
00:03:40.000But that's always been the cornerstone of conservatism.
00:03:42.640If you're a conservative candidate, the safest thing you can do is be anti-tax.
00:03:46.780So why has there been this temptation for Patrick Brown, for Brian Pallister to go into that pro-carbon tax, especially a carbon tax, which is probably one of the worst of taxes?
00:03:58.620Why is that temptation there for purported conservatives?
00:04:02.520Look, I want to give Manitoba Premier Pallister credit because he's still holding strong against the carbon tax.
00:04:09.380You know, there's a bit of this temptation, I think, with pressure from the left to say we've got to say something about it.
00:04:17.060Or conservative leaders, even in the federal party, that always just want to cut their losses and cut a deal and say, oh, we can't oppose this, we can't oppose that.
00:04:25.320But if you really keep backpedaling on it, you know, what what's left to define us from the liberals?
00:04:31.900I think it'll be a consequence of us continually losing elections if we adopt carbon pricing as a mainstay conservative policy in Canada.
00:04:44.280Ninety percent of, you know, polls have been released.
00:04:47.160Eighty to ninety percent of conservative voters are against it.
00:04:49.600And most polls show that the vast majority of Canadians, regardless of province, are against the carbon tax.
00:04:56.440And I also think that there are specific interests.
00:04:59.260Look, I think the green lobby that wants the carbon tax is very well funded.
00:05:03.380They have lobbyists in every level of government.
00:05:05.920We don't know what's discussed in those private meetings with ministers at any level.
00:05:27.200And because it's not really a corporate issue, it's a taxpayer issue because, you know, an oil company can get a carbon tax slapped on them.
00:05:34.860They'll just pass the cost down to the consumer or the taxpayer, whatever you want to call it.
00:05:41.180And so the consumer is really left without a choice on the product they're going to use.
00:05:47.920It's not going to change the environment.
00:05:49.460They don't have a voice for someone to lobby for them the way these corporate interests do on the left to impose a carbon tax.
00:05:56.400And it really is the best way for government to take money from taxpayers, fill government coffers, and hand out government handouts by their friends, by certain placements, by certain projects, in certain ridings they want to certain corporations.
00:06:16.380So it really is terrible even just from the beyond the policy.
00:06:21.840It's terrible from the politics as well.
00:06:23.460Well, I'm actually glad you brought that up because you have a few different battlegrounds for this.
00:06:30.120Is it constitutional that's going on through the courts now?
00:06:33.300You've got is it good politics or not, which I know has been a big part of the last little while with the Patrick Brown era and now the Doug Ford era of the PC party.
00:07:22.460The but the key to the acts, the carbon tax campaign that I think that's been overshadowed is at its core, it's a question of integrity and accountability.
00:07:33.700You have conservatives who, when they're looking for a vote in a leadership, say that they're against carbon taxes and they are fiscal conservatives.
00:07:42.380They brand themselves a certain way to get that vote.
00:07:45.880And after they get the position they want, they reverse course and they tell their voters that they're actually for some form of a carbon tax.
00:07:56.160That was certainly the case with Patrick Brown.
00:07:59.160And if you look, there was a poll out the other day that said the number one issue that voters are going to be looking at at the federal election has nothing to do with policy.
00:08:07.340It has to do with integrity and ethics of the politicians.
00:08:10.320Because if you present yourself a certain way to your voters and you get those votes and then you decide to reverse course, that's frowned upon, I think, even more than if you present a certain policy position that voters won't agree with, but they at least respect you for explaining and taking the position.
00:08:27.560Certainly, that's why Brian Pallister suffered, why Patrick Brown suffered amongst his voters.
00:08:33.820And I think that's going to that's an interesting thing to look at in the federal election as well.
00:08:38.980And that, you know, that betrayal of the base or the people that are going to get you the vote to win is, I think, at the top of the issue for the thousands of people that support the campaign and are against the carbon tax.
00:08:56.020You mentioned about I guess it would have been two years ago when the federal leadership race was on.
00:09:00.480And I was moderating a debate and there were, you know, at the time, like 97 candidates or something for the leadership.
00:09:07.140And I had this debate, you know, we go down and, you know, it takes three hours to get from one end to the other.
00:09:11.800And then Michael Chong, who was the leadership candidate, a conservative MP, says, you know, I support a revenue neutral carbon tax.
00:09:19.000And there were a few people that booed him at that point.
00:09:21.680And I actually, as much as I found it to be just a reprehensible notion that the conservative party would champion a carbon tax, I very much appreciated the transparency of it.
00:09:32.820And I think that you're bang on there.
00:09:34.260People have a lot more respect for someone who says, look, this is what I believe, this is my goal, versus someone who changes that goal depending on whether their audience is the internal party battle or trying to win over the hearts and minds of the media and all of these other things.
00:09:50.540And that's where I do think that it's going to backfire on anyone that does that bait and switch.
00:09:58.680And, you know, the other thing that we keep hearing, this false narrative, it's complete baloney, this false narrative that if conservatives don't adopt a carbon tax, they can't win.
00:10:10.420And this is the thing that was being pushed.
00:10:12.620And Ford won the leadership, went into the general election.
00:10:16.940Basically, he kept going back to scrap the carbon tax because the campaign was not very good because of all the distractions with rigged nominations, voter fraud, corruption in the party.
00:10:27.000He kept going back to scrap the carbon tax.
00:10:29.060And he got 2.3 million votes, which is the most votes that any party has ever gotten in Ontario's history.
00:10:37.140Only Mike Harris, the former PC leader and premier of Ontario, cracked 2 million.
00:10:42.700Ford was only the second person to crack 2 million.
00:10:45.780And he didn't have a position in favor of carbon pricing.
00:10:48.060And yet, even after he wins, we've got this proposal he has out that's supposed to come in this summer on industrial emission standards, where he agrees on the Paris targets.
00:11:00.400He wants to replace the federal version with an Ontario version and generate $400 million for Ontario coffers.
00:11:06.940So there's something in the narrative amongst the lobbyist class and the media class that kind of pushes this idea that if you don't adopt carbon pricing, you can't win.
00:11:18.420And yet, all the evidence suggests conservative parties will suffer if they adopt carbon pricing and they can win in opposition to carbon pricing.
00:11:31.080Some people, they keep pushing the narrative because it is a clever narrative from the left, right?
00:11:34.620Kind of getting the conservatives to drift to the left where there's no difference between them and they lose their base of support and the support starts collapsing.
00:11:44.880I was sitting in the courtroom for the Ontario carbon tax appeal back in April.
00:11:49.020And in the Ontario case, as well as the Saskatchewan case, the governments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and also in the Ontario case, the lawyer representing the United Conservative Party, which is now the government of Alberta,
00:12:01.700they were arguing tooth and nail that, no, no, no, we agree with everything the federal government says about global warming and the environment and climate change.
00:12:11.380We agree with, and, and, you know, if they do fine, but when you accept all of those premises, you set yourself up for exactly what you're describing, which is then, okay, what are you going to do about it?
00:12:23.620And I feel that that is putting conservatives in a corner in a way.
00:12:27.640I mean, they're putting themselves there because they don't want to say, well, actually, we don't think it's as bad as you say, or we don't agree with this particular part of your, your, your findings or your statement.
00:12:38.780And you're always going to then be forced with, okay, well, what are you going to do about it?
00:12:43.440And then you get governments like Doug Ford saying, okay, we have to put an Ontario solution forward.
00:12:48.500And, and I know Andrew Scheer will be in that same position.
00:12:50.960And the key thing that, you know, it's really simple.
00:12:55.060The key thing that you mentioned is if you concede the argument that the Paris Accord and the arbitrary number that Justin Trudeau picked of 30% reduction in emissions, if you concede the argument that all of that in carbon pricing will solve climate change, then I don't know how you went in court and say that the federal government shouldn't put it in because our provincial carbon price or carbon tax is better or just as good.
00:13:20.180It's a really weak position to go into, they should have went into court, poking holes into the entire Paris Accord, the arbitrary targets for every country, the fact that the fact that if Canada reduces its emissions by 30%, global emissions will go up because of carbon leakage.
00:13:38.560They should have poked holes in all of that instead of coming forward and saying, we have our own carbon tax, carbon price through regulatory means, that's the Ford government, and betraying the voters that, that voted for him on the pledge to scrap the carbon tax.
00:13:52.820Andrew Scheer is going to be in the same position.
00:13:55.100I don't think he's going to, look, he won the leadership.
00:13:58.400He was the strongest against the carbon tax.
00:14:00.640I think if you go back to that federal leadership, and one of the things that we haven't discussed is Bernier was actually pretty weak on the entire carbon tax question.
00:14:09.380He put most of his ammo on supply management.
00:14:13.460If he was as hard against the carbon tax as Andrew was, maybe he could have squeaked it out.
00:14:19.280So, Scheer is going to have a challenge here to see, you know, all the voices in this caucus, and there's obviously voices like Michael Chong that want the party to adopt a carbon tax, and we'll see which road they go later in the month.
00:14:32.320But, you know, I'm an advocate against the carbon tax.
00:14:35.620Ninety percent of conservatives are against the carbon tax, and my job is to hold their feet to the fire, regardless of party, regardless of stripe, because it really is a conservative position to take.
00:14:47.020And if they don't want to take it, they can't just hide behind the blue sign and the capital C conservative in the title.
00:14:53.340I think Doug Ford's win in Ontario came down to a lot of things.
00:14:57.320I think opposition to carbon tax was a part of it, but frustration with Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals, frustration with hydro rates, all of these, and the integrity issue that you mentioned earlier.
00:15:07.600When push comes to shove, looking ahead to the federal election, do you think carbon tax is the valid issue for a lot of people?
00:15:15.080Because the one reason I asked that, when I was knocking on doors as a candidate, only one person mentioned the environment was their top priority.
00:15:24.120I asked thousands of people, one person said the environment, that's it.
00:15:27.560Whereas I had hundreds that said, thousands actually, that said taxes, cost of living, etc.
00:15:33.480So do you think the carbon tax specifically can be a valid issue that is a winning one for conservatives?
00:15:38.560I think if you go back to what I said earlier, the poll that was out the other day, that said the number one issue for voters is integrity and ethics from a politician.
00:15:49.940And how that ties into policy is voters always look, are you consistent with the message and the vision that you're selling us?
00:15:57.960Or are you flip-flopping and are you wishy-washy or are you just changing your mind based on whoever puts a microphone in front of your face?
00:16:07.560And are you going to cave when the pressure mounts?
00:16:10.780Doug Ford did not only win because Kathleen Wynne was unpopular.
00:16:14.740If you look at the numbers, the Liberal vote dropped and most of that vote went to the NDP.
00:16:20.400They kind of traded numbers, 1.1 and 1.8 million voters.
00:16:24.200But Doug Ford and the PC Party's votes went from 1.5 million to 2.3.
00:16:28.580He got 800,000 more voters than we had gotten under Ernie Eves, John Tory and Tim Hudak in the last four elections.
00:16:36.840And those are conservatives who largely just skipped the last four elections.
00:16:42.340And it closely resembles the Stephen Harper vote of 2 million.
00:16:45.860And what drove that was obviously people were tired of Kathleen Wynne, which is why the Liberal vote collapsed.
00:16:53.060But based on the Ford Nation brand that Rob Ford built and presenting a fiscal conservative and a conservative vision of Ontario inspired 2.3 million voters to come out.
00:17:04.600And if he starts backing off with industrial emission standards and starts wavering every time the heat gets pushed, that 2.3 million will collapse very quickly.
00:17:13.320We're seeing it in the polls right now.
00:17:14.940And federally as well, I think carbon taxes is a serious issue.
00:17:20.320But what's more serious for voters is in the integrity and the principles and the ethics of the candidate.
00:17:26.120Are they standing behind the vision that they've always had or will they cave under the pressure?
00:17:31.120Will they inspire people or will they just tell people what they want to hear in any certain interview at a certain time?
00:17:36.640I think that's what it always comes down to.
00:17:40.380You have the base of every party that agree with their policies and you've got the small, you know, quote unquote swing voter that could be persuaded.
00:17:49.300You've got to persuade the largest number of people to vote for you at the end of the day.
00:17:53.960Well, I think you've hopefully persuaded some people with your comments today.
00:17:57.560Jim Carajalios, founder of Axe the Carbon Tax, joining us now.