Juno News - June 14, 2019


Canadians really hate the carbon tax


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

195.51408

Word count

831

Sentence count

45


Summary

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

A new poll from Forum Research has some inconvenient facts about public opinion on the carbon tax that don't work in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's favor. In this episode, we talk about the poll and why it doesn't bode well for the PM's chances of re-election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 A new public opinion poll out from Forum Research has some rather inconvenient facts about public
00:00:15.760 perception of the carbon tax that is not in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's favor. Now,
00:00:20.880 this is a very controversial tax, of course. A public opinion is divided, and we've got a
00:00:25.980 number of premiers going to court to fight over this matter, telling the federal government,
00:00:30.460 no, we don't want you to impose this on us. Now, Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna rather
00:00:35.580 bizarrely have said, all right, let's get it on. They want to take this fight all the way to the
00:00:40.700 October election. It seemed like at one point they wanted the election to be a referendum on this
00:00:46.220 issue. They continue to say, Andrew Scheer and others, they don't have a plan to deal with our
00:00:50.940 emissions to meet our Paris agreements and so forth, even though the current data shows that
00:00:55.580 Justin Trudeau's plan is not actually going to have Canada meet the Paris deal agreements in the first
00:01:01.020 place. That's a bit of a side note. And by the way, the answer to it, I think, is not to do more
00:01:05.980 to meet the agreements, to shut down various industries and sectors and say no to pipelines.
00:01:10.460 It's to withdraw from the Paris deal, because we don't need to be in it in the first place.
00:01:15.020 The United States has withdrawn from it. We can do it too. But that's a bit of a side note here,
00:01:20.220 because Justin Trudeau is not going to withdraw from the deal. He wants to go ahead with it,
00:01:24.540 and they're still going to be arguing about it to some degree in the election.
00:01:28.300 You've got to wonder, what are they thinking, though? I had chalked it up to the fact that they
00:01:32.060 are just true believers on the eco-alarmism front. I mean, the numbers surely don't suggest that they
00:01:37.580 have opinion on their side. And there's been a few different polls here and there that suggest,
00:01:41.500 surprisingly, there are a large number of Canadians that are actually okay with this carbon tax.
00:01:48.140 Although I think now that it's set in and we've seen the prices at the pump rise and
00:01:52.220 a lot of calling into question of its entire rationale, well, public opinion is moving away
00:01:56.940 from it. And that's what this latest forum research poll shows. It was a telephone poll where they
00:02:01.500 spoke with over 1,600 Canadians. 45% of them say, no thanks, we don't want it. And then about 25%
00:02:09.660 say they support the carbon tax and then the remainder are not certain. They're not particularly
00:02:14.380 for or against it. So there you have it, a plurality of Canadians against the carbon tax.
00:02:20.140 Now, conceivably, he could win over those undecided, match those numbers up. So I guess we could say it's
00:02:25.740 somewhat divided, but doesn't work in Justin Trudeau's favor. But here's where things get a
00:02:30.300 whole lot more interesting in it, though. They asked people based on their political views and their
00:02:35.980 their level of motivation for or against the carbon tax. Now, we find that 80% of conservatives
00:02:43.100 dead set against this, so they really don't like it. And as for liberals, well, only about half of them
00:02:48.460 actually really like the carbon tax. So the people who are against Justin Trudeau, really against the
00:02:53.820 carbon tax, but his own supporters, his own liberals, I mean, they're not all in love with it. So there's a
00:02:59.660 big problem there. The next one, though, is motivation. So 60% of Canadians, six in 10 of
00:03:06.380 those respondents, they say that this is going to affect their vote at the ballot box, the carbon tax
00:03:11.340 and their views on it, how they're going to vote. But how does that break down? Well, the people who
00:03:18.300 actually don't like the carbon tax say that it'll affect their vote way more than the people who do
00:03:24.620 support it. So basically, people who don't like it, really don't like it, they want to fight it, they
00:03:30.620 want to see it go away, and they're willing to vote against it. People who are kind of okay with the
00:03:35.500 carbon tax? Yeah, yeah, they're sort of okay with it. They like it. Is it going to really be the motivating
00:03:40.860 factor for them at the ballot box? It'll make them donors and volunteers and so forth for Justin Trudeau?
00:03:47.020 Not so much. So carbon tax support, to the degree that it exists, is soft. Yet another
00:03:54.380 indication that Justin Trudeau should maybe reconsider such an aggressive push for this.
00:03:59.900 I mean, in for a penny, in for a pound, he's really deep into the fight right now.
00:04:03.500 But you'd think of how divisive it has been, how damaging it's been to him.
00:04:07.100 Maybe he should just open the door a little, open the window to the possibility that
00:04:11.020 maybe he will soften on this. Maybe he will let us step away from it.