Juno News - August 28, 2019


Liberals accidentally reveal carbon tax hike plans

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Catherine McKenna Justin Trudeau
Most Canadians are Christian. Why can't Andrew Scheer be？ LAWTON： Stop With The Social Issues Litmus Test

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

188.86

Word count

746

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Liberals can t seem to figure out whether to raise the carbon tax, or not, and either that or they can t figure out how much they want to tell Canadians about their plans. In a rare moment of candor, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said that after 2022, the government would be raising the tax to $50 per ton.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Liberals can't seem to figure out whether they're going to raise the carbon tax or not.
00:00:08.000 Either that, or they can't seem to figure out how much they want to tell Canadians about their plans.
00:00:13.000 In the last couple of months, Catherine McKenna has flip-flopped a couple of times, 0.95
00:00:17.000 from at first the Liberals reviewing whether they'd need to raise the carbon tax to more than $50 a ton of emissions,
00:00:24.000 and then Catherine McKenna saying there'd be a cap on it and after 2022 there would never be an increase above $50 per ton.
00:00:33.000 And then a couple of days ago she decided to have a rare moment of candor with the Globe and Mail
00:00:38.000 and said that there would be an increase after Justin Trudeau was re-elected.
00:00:44.000 That after 2022 the government would be raising the carbon tax above that $50 threshold.
00:00:50.000 And we have a little bit of confusion now.
00:00:53.000 There's this back and forth and it seems like the Liberals aren't quite sure what it is they want to do.
00:00:58.000 Now I'm convinced that they're going to increase and I'm convinced that's always going to be the plan.
00:01:02.000 But I am also convinced that the Liberals know that it is not politically advantageous for them to tell Canadians
00:01:09.000 that if a Trudeau government is re-elected that there will be yet another increase to the cost of living.
00:01:15.000 So I think the issue is a lot more about how much they want to disclose rather than what they want to do.
00:01:20.000 The carbon tax has been and is a cash grab.
00:01:24.000 It's not a tax on paper because then the government would need to go through another mechanism to levy it.
00:01:29.000 But in practice it is a tax.
00:01:31.000 The government is trying to incentivize you to make better decisions it says
00:01:35.000 and going to charge you by doing things that result in carbon emissions.
00:01:39.000 Unfortunately in Canada emitting carbon is not exactly a luxury.
00:01:44.000 It's not a choice for a lot of people.
00:01:46.000 If you live in rural communities, remote communities things need to be shipped to you.
00:01:50.000 Things need to be sent.
00:01:52.000 If you live in a cold part of the country you've got to heat your home.
00:01:55.000 These are not choices that someone can live without.
00:01:58.000 So Canadians have to just pay the price whatever it is. 0.65
00:02:01.000 But oh no, don't worry.
00:02:02.000 The government's got your back by giving you a couple hundred dollars of your own money back
00:02:06.000 as this climate action incentive sham.
00:02:09.000 But here's the big issue right now.
00:02:12.000 Numerous studies have shown that a $50 a ton tax is not going to be strong enough
00:02:18.000 to have any of the behavior modification effects that the Liberals say will happen.
00:02:23.000 Some reports have said you need to go up to $300 a ton to have that
00:02:28.000 which means in order for the carbon tax to have any effect on behavior
00:02:31.000 you'd need to multiply it six times.
00:02:34.000 Now whether the Liberals would pursue something that aggressive we don't know.
00:02:38.000 But if they are genuinely serious about behavior modification,
00:02:42.000 their own mentality, their own ideology says they have to increase the tax.
00:02:47.000 And this is why Conservatives or anyone opposing the Liberals right now
00:02:51.000 needs to be saying this needs to be walked back.
00:02:55.000 We cannot accept the premise that taxing carbon emitting things,
00:03:00.000 that taxing energy in Canada is good policy.
00:03:04.000 It's also bad politics which is why Catherine McKenna had to walk back her comment
00:03:09.000 that ended up making so many people scratch their head and say,
00:03:12.000 but wait I thought you weren't going to raise it.
00:03:14.000 So right now we've got an environment minister whose moment of honesty
00:03:18.000 has shown Canadians the Liberals true colors.
00:03:21.000 That even the carbon tax we have is not enough,
00:03:24.000 the government wants even more of your money.
00:03:27.000 These stories are why it's so important to fairly and honestly and transparently cover the government
00:03:33.000 and cover this upcoming election.
00:03:35.000 It's going to be an important one,
00:03:36.000 but True North doesn't have the billion dollars the CBC does
00:03:39.000 or the hundreds of millions the mainstream media is getting.
00:03:42.000 Our money comes from you, our supporters.
00:03:45.000 We have an election coverage crowdfunding campaign going.
00:03:48.000 There's a link in the description box if you can ship in a few dollars.
00:03:51.000 It will go a long way to ensuring the real stories get told this election season.
00:03:55.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.