Juno News - January 31, 2023


The alarming report on the Trudeau Liberals plans for fertilizer regulations


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

183.65562

Word count

630

Sentence count

18


Summary

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

A really important and concerning exclusive from True North reveals that the Trudeau Liberal Government has been considering a regulatory backstop when it comes to reductions of emissions from fertilizers if they don t get what they want through voluntary measures. What does this all mean and why does it matter?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 A really important and concerning exclusive from True North by Cosmon Georgia reveals that the
00:00:05.420 Trudeau Liberal government has been considering a regulatory backstop when it comes to reductions
00:00:11.420 of emissions from fertilizers if they don't get what they want through voluntary measures.
00:00:18.160 What does this all mean and why does it matter? It sounds sort of technically convoluted,
00:00:22.880 but basically the Trudeau government has decided that emissions from fertilizers is one of the
00:00:27.600 things that concerns them when it comes to their climate change agenda. They're bringing in a whole
00:00:32.660 variety of legislation and rules, plastic bag bans, electric vehicle sales targets, you name it,
00:00:39.240 obviously bringing up the carbon tax, creating the second carbon tax when it comes to the clean fuel
00:00:43.740 standard, and now this, where they're looking at fertilizers used by farmers and saying, while they
00:00:49.380 create emissions, we want to reduce those emissions. So they've been proposing what they call a 30%
00:00:55.480 reduction in the emissions from those fertilizers. They say they're not proposing a 30% reduction in
00:01:00.980 use of fertilizers, just in the emissions that come from them. How you separate those two, though,
00:01:06.520 a lot of people say technically is something that still has yet to be answered. So they're basically
00:01:11.560 proposing a reduction in fertilizer usage, but it's going to be voluntary. Okay, I guess that's okay
00:01:19.480 then, and they're going to leave it up to farmers to decide whether or not they proceed with it,
00:01:23.320 but what's the point of the government even doing something if they say it's voluntary? Here's where
00:01:28.460 these documents, internal government documents that True North has acquired via access to information
00:01:33.860 come into play, finding that during this discussion, government officials did discuss bringing in a
00:01:39.900 regulatory backstop to basically make this mandatory. Now that phrase, regulatory backstop,
00:01:46.480 that's actually the same phrase that they used when it came to the carbon tax. So they told provinces,
00:01:51.080 look, there's going to be no national carbon tax, just so long as you guys introduce a provincial
00:01:56.020 carbon tax that we're satisfied with. And of course, it didn't turn out that way, and a couple
00:02:00.360 provinces went to the courts to fight it. They lost, and now we have a national carbon tax in effect
00:02:05.600 in places like Ontario. Why does this fertilizer story pose a problem? Why should Canadians be concerned
00:02:11.580 about it? Well, because a number of industry groups and farmers have said, look, if you basically reduce
00:02:17.240 fertilizer usage by 30%, it means you're reducing our yields by 30%, because fertilizers are what's
00:02:24.620 allowing us to basically live in this modern society with the degree of food production that
00:02:29.120 we currently have. You reduce the yields, what does that mean? It basically means you reduce the volume
00:02:34.220 of food, which means we're making less food, and we need the food that we produce, and we're also going
00:02:39.400 to see food prices increase at a time when, as all Canadians know, they've already increased
00:02:44.240 quite a deal. So where do we go from here? Well, the Liberal government maintains that the proposal
00:02:49.260 is for this to be voluntary, but the documents show that they have acknowledged maybe we'll have
00:02:54.180 to make it mandatory. We'll see where the government proceeds with this, but farmers not happy. I know
00:02:59.680 industry is hoping that they can resolve this through back-channel conversations and through
00:03:04.000 negotiating with government, but we've seen in other places around the world, like in the Netherlands,
00:03:08.560 there have been protests that verge on riots because farmers are so frustrated with heavy-handed
00:03:13.900 impositions. What's going to happen next here? Who knows, but hopefully for those concerned about
00:03:19.480 what this means for the food supply chain, we don't see any sort of mandatory backstop come into play.