Juno News - January 31, 2023


The alarming report on the Trudeau Liberals plans for fertilizer regulations

Mentioned
Cosman Georgia Trudeau
Canadians share their favourite memories from the Freedom Convoy Tucker Carlson triggers Ottawa AGAIN

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

183.66

Word count

630

Sentence count

25


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).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.