Juno News - February 10, 2024


Liberals attempt to rebrand the carbon tax (ft. Kris Sims)

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Danielle Smith Caleb James
Danielle Smith on transgender policies, Alberta energy, and Justin Trudeau Energy CEO reacts to NDP bill to jail oil and gas advocates

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

182.37

Word count

2,083

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Chris Simons, Director of the Canadian Taxpayers federation (CTF) joins us to talk about the carbon tax, the "pinkie-on-a-pig" carbon tax that keeps on giving, and the chicken wing mutiny.

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 .
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 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 in any event it is monday and what we do every monday is we check in with our good friend chris
00:00:14.220 sims who is the alberta director for the canadian taxpayers federation chris good to have you here
00:00:19.200 thank you thanks for having us i mean the carbon tax you and i have called it a tongue-in-cheek
00:00:24.260 gift that keeps on giving because it just keeps on giving content but evidently our content has
00:00:29.200 been working because the liberals are trying to give it a little refrain refresh a little rebrand
00:00:34.140 they're uh trying to put lipstick on a pig here what on earth is happening it's pretty funny and
00:00:41.440 your term has been used a lot in politics and what i love about this is that it's been used a lot with
00:00:46.760 the carbon tax in fact it was former provincial ndp leader in british columbia carol james who called
00:00:54.060 the notion of a revenue neutral carbon tax lipstick on a pig this is way back in the olden days andrew
00:01:01.320 when the ndp didn't like the carbon tax i i'm old enough to remember that so it's really funny to
00:01:07.160 see this phrase coming back to bite them because that's exactly what they're trying to do this is
00:01:12.020 how it goes okay so prime minister justin trudeau's government has this big honking ugly carbon tax and 1.00
00:01:18.860 he's quadrupling the thing within the next seven years or so we peasants though andrew are too stupid 0.99
00:01:26.660 to understand just how wonderful and beneficial this carbon levy is and so in their magnanimity 0.98
00:01:34.160 the trudeau government has now decided to go back to their little whiteboard and figure out a way to
00:01:40.640 rebrand the carbon tax and especially its heavenly rebates so they're going to try to figure out a way
00:01:47.480 to try to bamboozle people i don't know what they're going to call the rebate now like super
00:01:52.440 stardust fancy rebate something uh double plus good who knows so all this is to say they're going
00:01:58.660 to be spending taxpayers money probably talking to a bunch of consultants and lobbyists to put their
00:02:05.060 heads together how to resell the carbon tax and the rebates to canadians when the facts are the math
00:02:13.060 speaks for itself the parliamentary budget officer has figured out that the average canadian family
00:02:19.840 especially here in alberta will be out more than 900 this year in 2024 with the rebates factored in
00:02:30.160 that's net because of the carbon tax so people aren't dumb they know that this is emptying their
00:02:36.420 wallets they know that this is basically a tax on everything but the trudeau government is undeterred
00:02:42.020 they're going to try to polish this one yeah and look i mean uh sales marketing advertising
00:02:49.420 communications all of these have a place they're all valuable but uh the one thing you should always
00:02:54.600 do is a bit of an introspection activity whenever you are thinking you need a rebrand is wonder whether
00:03:00.400 people are aware of the policy and dislike it on its merits and that's the thing here i mean it's one
00:03:07.680 area to say okay well people don't really understand this so we're gonna you know sell it to them so
00:03:13.120 that they understand it in this case the reason people don't like it is because they understand it
00:03:18.000 because they see how much it's costing them so in that case any rebrand is just going to be lying
00:03:23.020 yeah exactly the call is coming from inside the house folks this is the problem and it's one of
00:03:30.060 these things where you see no matter which government is in power which party is in power
00:03:34.500 quite often if they stay in government this long they can just really become ensconced in their
00:03:40.120 bubble they become tone deaf they stop listening to what us average worker drones are doing and saying
00:03:46.560 and they start believing their own spin and this is exactly what's happening in ottawa with this idea 0.99
00:03:53.140 of oh well we just need to explain it to these dumb dumbs better and then they will love us all again 0.88
00:03:58.620 it reminds me of that meme that they use for principal skinner all the time from the simpsons it's like 0.98
00:04:03.280 you know am i wrong no definitely it's the children that's what we're dealing with here
00:04:06.760 yeah i wanted to ask you about this other thing i hadn't heard of this until you brought it up
00:04:11.180 something called a wing night mutiny now i love wings i don't love mutiny as much but uh if there
00:04:17.160 are enough wings i can tolerate the mutiny what's the wing night mutiny yeah i'm just full disclosure a
00:04:23.300 huge fan of chicken wings myself if you ever go to a restaurant with me you'll wind up with like this
00:04:27.620 goblin pile of bones in front of you right so i think this is important so this is funny
00:04:33.260 the city of calgary following suit with the city of edmonton which is much more docile except for
00:04:38.840 their hockey team um the city of edmonton took this lying down a few months ago but the city of calgary
00:04:43.940 boy they're not taking this what this is is there's now a 15 cent mandatory tax per paper bag
00:04:51.940 there's a dollar mandatory municipal tax per reusable bag those ones that fill up all of our
00:04:58.640 under sink cabinets and in our trunks um the idea of plastic single-use bags like that's right out
00:05:04.180 right because prime minister trudeau banned those things but here in calgary it wasn't just the bags
00:05:10.060 they actually put forward this new law and enforced it saying you now must beg slash plead
00:05:17.620 for a napkin when you're at a restaurant or a wooden fork please mayor gondek may i have a fork
00:05:25.740 or utensil to eat my my meal so it's redonkulous because this local government like we're gonna save
00:05:33.080 the world by making people ask for napkins and so premier danielle smith had a really funny line 1.00
00:05:38.580 she said yeah this almost caused a week wing night mutiny so we're picturing people just revolting
00:05:46.240 in pubs across canada and like flinging their chicken wings at people i don't know if that
00:05:51.620 happened i have not yet heard reports but wing night mutiny became a thing and that actually helped
00:05:56.920 energize uh local politicians some of the city councillors on calgary city hall it kind of gave 0.95
00:06:03.000 them the the courage to speak up and to say you know what this is stupid we shouldn't have a 15 cent 0.96
00:06:08.400 bag tax it's going to be 25 cents next year and we shouldn't be nuisancing people to death on things 0.97
00:06:14.440 like forks and napkins for goodness sake stick to your knitting city hall so this really gave uh city
00:06:20.560 councillors around calgary city hall table the courage to speak up and to say you know what 0.94
00:06:26.040 we shouldn't be nickel and diming people to death with nuisance taxes like dumb things like these bag
00:06:31.120 taxes and we certainly shouldn't as mayor be telling people whether or not they can have napkins like 0.96
00:06:37.780 that's so dumb and so what's really interesting here is that now this could cascade into edmonton 0.83
00:06:44.700 the folks of edmonton might now find their voice because the people of calgary have spoken up but 0.98
00:06:49.740 it's not over yet in calgary they still need to email their councillors they still need to phone the
00:06:54.720 mayor's office see stuff like this though is infuriating for not just because i i too like chicken
00:07:00.600 wings but uh because it's the kind of thing that people pretend is little and people pretend is small
00:07:07.760 they say oh what's the big deal they still have napkins you just have to ask for them but it really
00:07:12.820 speaks to an attitude issue here because when government is regulating things so small and so
00:07:18.500 seemingly insignificant it's licensing government to regulate the big things to regulate the giant
00:07:23.500 things and at a certain point it's going to be where i literally this would not be far off to
00:07:28.880 believe where governments mandate cloth napkins yep uh where governments mandate cloth napkins and
00:07:33.680 all of a sudden your crappy hole in the wall diner has to have linen like it's a you know a michelin
00:07:37.800 star restaurant or whatever because that's what the government has decreed and that's i think the
00:07:43.220 problem here is that when you license government to encroach on something like this you're giving it
00:07:48.800 a power that will only expand and balloon just like the carbon tax has increased and ballooned yes exactly
00:07:55.400 the carbon tax started at oh it's only you know it's only ten dollars per ton well it's going to
00:08:00.860 be a hundred and seventy dollars per ton pretty soon folks it used to cost you about 50 cents in the
00:08:05.700 carbon tax pretty soon it's going to be costing you twenty dollars every single time you fill up with the
00:08:10.600 carbon tax and you really nailed nailed it here andrew because we can even give you an example of how
00:08:16.580 quickly this can escalate so in vancouver the city of vancouver they still have their bag tax yes
00:08:23.160 but they did have to climb down on this weird cup tax i don't know if you heard about this but i was
00:08:30.520 living next to vancouver when this all happened so it was pretty crazy so the city of vancouver along
00:08:36.180 with their bag fee also imposed this weird cup tax so that every single time you went to a coffee shop
00:08:42.200 or a gas station or some mom and pop corner store and you dared use a disposable paper cup they were
00:08:48.920 charging you an extra 25 cents where did that quarter go it didn't go to the city so where was
00:08:56.500 it going i phoned them and asked them this was the plan they wanted to force all of these stores
00:09:03.440 to collect these quarters save them all up because in the very near future the city of vancouver was
00:09:10.940 going to ban all disposable or single use cups every single one of them would not be allowed within the
00:09:18.560 city limits how are we to drink coffee you ask they actually wanted to force vancouverites to share
00:09:25.860 a communal pool of cups i'm not kidding and the money that these businesses were being forced to
00:09:34.880 collect was supposed to go to a dishwasher so that now these businesses would be responsible
00:09:41.120 for washing everybody's cup that has been you know in their backpack on sky train for a week or
00:09:47.000 under their truck seat or whatever just imagine imagine hundreds of thousands of people being
00:09:53.240 forced adults to force to share this group of cups it was so weird that they actually had to back down
00:10:01.000 but again this is what happens when you give them that inch yeah no very well said it'd be like the
00:10:06.200 stanley cup craze in the uh i think it's mostly in the u.s now those like i don't even get the stanley cup
00:10:11.800 craze it's not even a hockey thing it's like some there's some like weird like reusable cup that
00:10:16.840 everyone is uh like going crazy over and it's like it's just a reusable mug so i don't know stanley
00:10:22.760 actually there's a stanley park in bc isn't there it's the stanley park cups we'll say yes i would like
00:10:27.480 to think that or i'd like to think it's a hockey thing but what's really funny is that in actual fact
00:10:32.120 like stanley the company's been around forever it's like thermos right it's almost become synonymous with
00:10:37.320 something that keeps your coffee hot and like working men at like construction sites have had
00:10:43.320 these things in their trucks forever but for some reason these big pink ones took off and i don't
00:10:49.160 know some pretty you know what uh the liberal government should hire the stanley marketing 1.00
00:10:53.320 team to do their carbon tax rebrand uh because clearly they've managed to uh to do something
00:10:59.640 pretty good on their own rebrand over at stanley looks like a shade of lipstick you know yeah there you go
00:11:05.320 all right uh chris sims we will talk to you next monday always a pleasure thank you so much for
00:11:10.360 coming on thank you thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to
00:11:16.040 true north at www.tnc.news