Juno News - Liberals cover up $25 billion cost of carbon tax

00:00:00.000 Again, what was interesting too is that the CSIS Act, I just was alerted to this this

00:00:13.900 morning in a Globe and Mail piece. The CSIS Act actually gives CSIS the opportunity to

00:00:18.620 go to the leader of a party and say, yeah, you should be aware of this thing that affects

00:00:22.920 your party. So they won't tell Polyev about a liberal MP. They won't tell him about a

00:00:27.500 new Democrat. But if there was a conservative MP or a conservative candidate, CSIS could

00:00:32.660 go to him and tell him what their concerns were. The conservatives say that has not happened.

00:00:38.860 They have received no such briefing, no such alert from CSIS. Now, CSIS may be fumbling

00:00:44.200 the ball. This has happened on a couple of occasions. But it could also be that these

00:00:48.060 are not issues that are in the conservative caucus. These are issues that are in the liberal

00:00:52.380 caucus, the only caucus, which by the way, the leader has not come out and denied having

00:00:58.160 any members of parliament implicated. So take from that what you will. But you should pay

00:01:03.240 attention to Trudeau's refusal to even answer the question. And you may think that they want

00:01:09.260 to apply this whole national security thing to anything that makes them look bad, including

00:01:13.000 the government's own carbon tax projections. They fought tooth and nail to keep these from

00:01:17.960 being published. They told the parliamentary budget officer, yeah, you can look at them,

00:01:21.620 but don't you dare talk about them. They put a gag on him. And Chris Sims and her colleagues

00:01:26.900 at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation have figured out exactly why that is. Chris, always good

00:01:32.920 to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:01:34.840 Thanks for having us on.

00:01:36.220 Now, again, the liberals may want it, but it's not a national security secret. We can talk

00:01:40.980 about these figures that we have seen. What do the numbers tell us?

00:01:44.420 It's pretty brutal, Andrew. And it's no wonder really why now it turns out the Trudeau government

00:01:49.960 didn't want the parliamentary budget officer reporting this number. So if I can just rewind

00:01:55.560 the tape back to when everybody understood from the parliamentary budget office, where

00:02:00.140 they had come up with two different scenarios. One was just the base cost, okay, of Monica

00:02:05.860 filling up her little Honda Civic hatchback, how much that cost her, you know, translation that

00:02:10.640 was around six or seven dollars. Oh, look, eight out of 10 people get more back in rebates

00:02:14.960 than they pay out. The problem there was, of course, the PBO did his homework and they

00:02:20.080 had a secondary calculation which talked about the economic impact of the Trudeau government's

00:02:25.440 carbon tax. So that means, of course, how much the farmer is paying to grow the food

00:02:29.460 with the carbon tax, how much the trucker is paying to fill up the big rig to bring you

00:02:33.240 the food, how much you pay for home heating. You get the idea. And there, that just blew it

00:02:38.260 out of the water. There, I think it was over $900 per year per Alberta household with rebates

00:02:44.560 factored in. Fast forward to very recently, the parliamentary budget officer had said,

00:02:50.860 you know what, I've gone back and have done some new calculations. And then all of a sudden

00:02:55.160 the Trudeau government was like, shh, like, stop talking about it. And so that was super

00:03:00.920 weird, right? And that, of course, got everybody interested, including the opposition, saying,

00:03:05.540 cough up the data. Well, very late last week, cough up the data they did. Now, we don't have

00:03:11.840 the breakdown of per person yet or per province yet, but we're working on it. We've got a team

00:03:19.320 of folks who are working on this in Ottawa right now. So big picture, Andrew, it looks like in the

00:03:25.480 year 2030, the carbon tax is going to cost the Canadian economy around $25 billion. Now that's

00:03:35.380 just in that one year. I need to stress that. That is not the cumulative cost of the carbon tax

00:03:42.720 between now and 2030. That's just for this singular year. Now the data sheets and the spreadsheets we

00:03:49.500 have here are mind boggling. You know, when you open up an Excel spreadsheet and you've got that little

00:03:54.500 slider on the right where you can move stuff up and down, there's so many rows of data in just

00:03:59.500 one of these tables that that little slider is like the size of a peppercorn. Like, I can't even

00:04:06.160 remember how many rows of data are in these models. So it's pretty crazy. But big shot is that it's

00:04:11.480 around $25 billion by 2030. So it's no wonder they wanted to keep it under wraps.

00:04:16.060 Yeah, but again, so costing the economy that, this is the carbon tax that we're told is quote

00:04:20.640 unquote revenue neutral, right? Yes. So it's weird that it can be revenue neutral yet somehow

00:04:25.800 have a $25 billion annual cost to the economy. How do we get there?

00:04:29.960 Yeah, exactly. Just add government. That's how you get there. They can just take whatever they

00:04:34.780 want and try to spin a narrative out of it. And in all seriousness, this is where the math just never

00:04:40.460 holds up. And just bringing people back to the original cause of the carbon tax here in North

00:04:44.820 America. In 2008, the BC Liberal government brought in what they called and promised was going to be

00:04:51.760 a revenue neutral carbon tax. That was under then Premier Gordon Campbell. Now, to be fair,

00:04:58.200 on paper, initially, one could argue that it was revenue neutral, because back then it was about

00:05:04.320 three or four cents per liter. And they also put forward a corresponding income tax cut right across

00:05:11.200 the board. So the nerds in universities and economics classes could say, yeah, on paper,

00:05:16.880 this is revenue neutral. But the problem there is it doesn't factor in the nature of government

00:05:21.340 and the nature of people, right? Because government, of course, is people. And if they can find a revenue

00:05:26.600 stream, i.e. a vampiric tax they can sink their fangs deeper into, that's exactly what they're going to 0.99

00:05:32.320 do, Andrew. So after a couple of years in BC, what did they start doing? They took in, say, a billion

00:05:38.280 dollars, for argument's sake, for the carbon tax. And then to make it look revenue neutral on the

00:05:43.360 budget, that's where they just started filing all their random tax credits for everything. Like old

00:05:49.240 people tax credits, fitness gyms. So when you're going to the gym and pulling your hamstrings,

00:05:53.220 you got a fitness tax credit for that. So this is what government does. And now we have the Trudeau

00:05:58.840 government saying something silly, like you get more back than you pay in. Well, this shows that is

00:06:04.500 obviously not true. Yeah, the same isn't true for the Canadian economy. The same isn't true for the

00:06:09.100 country. This is it. And for people, people watching your show know the deal. But when you're talking to

00:06:14.720 your uncle or your sister-in-law or somebody who still doesn't quite get it, they can say things

00:06:19.040 like, oh, well, that's just the economic cost. Who cares about that? Okay. The economy is not some

00:06:24.980 alien force that does not affect your day-to-day life. Everything you do, where you're filling up your

00:06:30.460 car, when you're purchasing food that was grown, when you're thinking of buying a house, when you're

00:06:34.840 fixing your vehicle, all that stuff, that's all the economy. It's working around you like the force,

00:06:42.020 okay? If you tax that thing and you blow a $25 billion hole in the side of its hull, you're going

00:06:48.880 to have some troubled waters. Well, and I always want to take the bigger picture on this because the

00:06:54.520 carbon tax is based on a number of premises. It's based on the premise that man-made global warming is

00:06:59.960 caused by the emissions that are regulated by the carbon tax. It's predicated on the fact that

00:07:05.120 the carbon tax will result in the reduction of those emissions. It's predicated on the idea that

00:07:10.100 even if Canada were to reduce its emissions, that will cause a global reduction. And one of the

00:07:16.920 arguments Michael Binion from the Modern Miracle Network has made is that you could make Canada's

00:07:21.880 emissions go up and lower global emissions because we are more efficient with our energy production than

00:07:28.160 other countries are. So that's one argument that's put forward. But you bring this up all the time,

00:07:33.280 and I think it's important. We have about 1.5% of global emissions that are Canada's responsibility.

00:07:38.820 And no carbon tax proposal, no environmental proposal in Canada has proposed getting that

00:07:44.900 even down to 1%, say. And even if it did, that would be a drop in the bucket globally.

00:07:50.080 Thank you. And I think this is worth pointing out because you and I, you know, we can sit here and

00:07:56.400 bang our heads against the wall about the carbon tax quite a bit. But every now and then, I think

00:08:00.960 it's important to reach across the aisle and try to meet people where they are. So let's say for

00:08:06.020 argument's sake, okay, that your key issue is global emissions, okay? Keeps you up at night, gets you out of

00:08:13.000 bed in the morning. It's the reason why you've gone to university to pursue a trade or whatever it is

00:08:17.040 that's a calling for you. Okay, let's meet them there, okay? It still doesn't work. This equation

00:08:24.900 still doesn't work. Because as you point out, Canada is responsible for about 1.5% of global

00:08:31.200 emissions, okay? We also have a gigantic honking boreal forest that a lot of scientists keep trying

00:08:37.860 to gently point out, but few people seem to understand or talk about. So okay, let's set that

00:08:41.960 aside. Look at the math. Look at just the emissions. Even if Canada ceased to exist to

00:08:47.020 tomorrow, God forbid, and we stopped heating and eating and growing our food and driving to work,

00:08:52.300 it wouldn't make a dent in global emissions. So for the folks who are truly gripped with this fear

00:08:57.700 that we're all going to boil the planet in the next 18 months or so and that Canada is responsible 0.97

00:09:03.100 and that using a carbon tax will reduce that, that doesn't even make sense to meet them with

00:09:09.000 their own math, Andrew. So then why not look at the big end of the arithmetic problem and say, okay,

00:09:14.720 where is there a global democracy with a big population that has a really heavy emissions

00:09:20.200 output right now? India. Okay, we've worked with India quite a bit. They used to be a commonwealth

00:09:25.100 country. There's a lot of interchange there. What if we sold them our natural gas instead of them

00:09:30.640 burning wood and animal dung every single day? Guess what? The government of India is begging us

00:09:36.660 to sell them natural gas from Canada. So that would reduce global emissions. That column in that graph

00:09:43.040 would go down and we wouldn't need a carbon tax here in Canada, which is doing absolutely nothing,

00:09:48.360 by the way, here in Canada. We're still getting increasing emissions in Canada. The government's own

00:09:53.280 data between 2023 and 2024 shows an increase in federal emissions in Canada, even though we have

00:10:02.000 a carbon tax. This lines up perfectly with BC. Well, and that brings it, I mean, the other premise

00:10:06.660 or one of the other premises is that the emitting activities are discretionary, which is in the case

00:10:12.740 of rural Canadians, absolutely wrong. I'll give an example of this. So I live in southwestern Ontario. 0.99

00:10:17.860 So when I drive to Toronto, which I try to avoid, but I've had to a few times as of late,

00:10:21.700 you go on the 401 and there's a lane carved out at several points for carpooling or electric

00:10:28.260 vehicles, the high occupancy vehicle lane. And you look in this and oftentimes it's empty.

00:10:34.380 And the reason when you see people in it that have two or more people in their cars,

00:10:38.320 I'm not convinced a single one of them has chosen to carpool to use the lane. They are people who

00:10:45.040 happen to have an extra person in the car and say, oh, great, I can use the carpool lane today.

00:10:48.760 But it's not actually incentivizing behavior. It's just ultimately penalizing everyone else on the

00:10:54.280 road. And I think the same is true of the carbon tax where very few people are choosing to live

00:11:00.620 differently because driving their kids, driving to work, these things for a lot of people are not

00:11:06.360 choices. These are now things that are simply penalized when you have to heat your home or fill

00:11:11.960 up your tank. Yes, exactly. And so any way you look at this argument, these folks in the Guibo mentality 0.81

00:11:18.760 and Minister Stéphane Guibo's mentality, who are really zealous about this sort of stuff,

00:11:24.460 they're always lost for an answer. Because any way you come at them with the cost of the carbon tax,

00:11:29.080 oh, shows you the data is actually costing people big time money with the emissions. Oh, once again,

00:11:34.580 here in Canada, emissions are going up anyway. And we're not the ones that are contributing to the

00:11:39.080 big time global emissions. So why don't we focus on that instead? And bingo, exactly this. So I wanted

00:11:45.480 to quickly talk about this. Okay, so when the carbon tax was first hatched in North America, again,

00:11:50.420 going back to BC, and Trudeau used British Columbia as a model. That's why I keep going back to it,

00:11:55.140 because it's a template. Okay, government is just like high school, you get in with the cool crowd,

00:11:59.100 and you're a follower. So this is what they're doing. Okay, I was never getting in with the cool

00:12:03.520 crowd. You'll have to come up with a better explanation. Me neither. But you know, here we are.

00:12:07.680 I was a drama kid. So take a look there, right? And so what they were also promising is that with

00:12:13.420 this big shiny new carbon tax that was revenue neutral, when there's a chicken in every pot,

00:12:17.980 is that it would create an abundance of affordable, accessible, abundant, consistent, alternative

00:12:26.020 energy. Okay, that people would be able to switch. Okay, it's like switching between a plastic bag and a

00:12:33.300 little nylon bag that you brought from home. It's annoying, sure, but that's kind of a switch,

00:12:37.980 right? There's no switch for the vast majority of people to make in Canada. Yes, there are those

00:12:44.120 hardcore people who managed to live with a pedal bike and a solar panel on their roof. We're talking

00:12:48.800 about the vast majority of folks, they don't have a way of switching their energy source. And it's been

00:12:54.440 since 2008. So the government solution to all of this has been no solution. It's simply become now

00:13:01.020 a financial punishment for heating your home, driving to work and feeding your kids. People are backed into

00:13:09.280 a corner and the government keeps hitting them with this carbon tax, which is a punishment. And the

00:13:14.340 liberal government, by the way, used the term punishment in an interview. So now we're at this weird

00:13:19.620 crossroads where they're trying to move the goalposts, Andrew, and talk more about wealth

00:13:26.100 redistribution and being fairer to poorer people and taking away from middle class and working class

00:13:32.680 people and handing it to the folks who could never afford a car in the beginning. They didn't talk like

00:13:37.960 this when they first launched the carbon tax. When they first launched the carbon tax, they said it was

00:13:42.500 going to be revenue neutral, that it would reduce emissions, and it would create a whole bunch of

00:13:48.660 alternative energies that everybody could use. None of those things has happened.

00:13:54.500 Very well said. I know you'll keep on this, Chris. We'll perhaps get an update from you

00:13:58.240 next week. Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Always a pleasure.

00:14:02.000 Thank you.

00:14:02.900 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North

00:14:07.280 at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - June 22, 2024

Liberals cover up $25 billion cost of carbon tax

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