What Jason Kenney's big win means for the carbon tax
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
181.10947
Summary
Jason Kenney has been elected Prime Minister of Alberta, and now he s heading to Ottawa to work with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to push through the federal carbon tax. In this episode, I discuss the implications of Jason Kenney becoming Prime Minister, and why the carbon tax is now dead.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
There's already been a lot of conversation about what the election of Jason Kenney means for the
00:00:13.920
country as a whole. Not just politics on a provincial level for Albertans, but politics
00:00:19.080
on a federal level for all of Canada. Now partially this is about political calculus,
00:00:24.660
election calculus, like say whether or not having Jason Kenney join the mix with all
00:00:29.400
these other conservative premiers is a good thing for Andrew Scheer or a bad thing for
00:00:34.200
Andrew Scheer. Whether or not Justin Trudeau is going to say to swing voters, hey look you've
00:00:38.680
already got a bunch of conservative premiers, a bunch of conservative leaders in this province,
00:00:43.140
in this country, you don't want one more. So vote for me, re-elect me, because you need me to be a
00:00:49.160
check on balance in all of this. Now we'll see if the regular voter actually believes that or not,
00:00:54.140
but I think there's another issue that I want to talk about here, that the election of Jason Kenney
00:00:58.700
means massive things on the federal scene. And that is the federal carbon tax.
00:01:04.700
I think it's done. Dead. Toast. And I think Justin Trudeau should wise enough to that and act
00:01:11.140
accordingly. In fact, I'm surprised he hasn't. You know, back during the electoral reform discussion,
00:01:16.380
Trudeau campaigned on bringing electoral reform, said we got to do it. And a lot of people started
00:01:20.760
asking a bunch of questions. Well, what do you mean? We don't understand how this works. It was
00:01:24.100
controversial. They started touring around the country and some people liked it. Others didn't.
00:01:28.880
They were disagreeing on the actual parts they liked about it. And I said, Trudeau's got to drop
00:01:33.260
this. He's got to get rid of electoral reform. And if he does, I will applaud him for it. He dropped it
00:01:38.840
and I applaud him for it. I continue to this day to say he made the right choice. Maybe he made it for,
00:01:43.860
I don't know, cynical electoral reasons, whatever, but he made the right choice and good for him.
00:01:48.700
The carbon tax should be the exact same issue. Because now that Alberta is one of the provinces
00:01:56.420
that is going to be saying no to the carbon tax, we have five provinces in this country.
00:02:02.260
Five provinces which are saying they don't want this thing. Now you add up the population of those
00:02:07.700
five provinces and you have more than half of the country. So most of these elections of these
00:02:14.460
premiers have taken place after Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015. So the mandate is clear in
00:02:20.080
these provinces. And Jason Kenney, Doug Ford, they very much said that they opposed the carbon tax
00:02:25.260
in their election campaigns when they were elected. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau, he doesn't even have a
00:02:30.820
really clear mandate to bring in this thing. Because did he mention carbon price in the campaign?
00:02:35.380
Yes, he did. But it wasn't one of the big ticket items, like say the deficits and the
00:02:40.640
infrastructure spending, and well, even electoral reform, that he harped on continually. His core
00:02:45.600
mandate was not to bring in the carbon tax. So not only do we have a country that is increasingly
00:02:51.800
opposed to this, we've also got the legal challenges. The Saskatchewan court reference
00:02:56.620
question and the Ontario court case, the hearings of which just wrapped up. And we're going to hear
00:03:01.360
the results of that. This thing might go all the way up to the Supreme Court. So you've got provinces
00:03:07.420
and the feds fighting over this controversial issue. This is not good for the federation. It
00:03:13.140
is really tearing apart elements of the federation. And thirdly, you've got the absolute rancor that
00:03:20.280
this issue is bringing about. People scrapping over it. It's an incredibly acrimonious issue.
00:03:26.200
Now, as a number of provinces have said, Ontario Environment, Mr. Rod Phillips has been saying this,
00:03:30.480
there are many ways to be responsible stewards for the environment. It's not just this one single
00:03:36.820
blunt instrument, the carbon tax. You can do many other things on this file. And the general issue
00:03:43.500
of whether or not you're going to bring in lower emissions and so forth, there are sectors like the
00:03:48.460
forestry sector, for instance, that is already having much lower emissions based on voluntary
00:03:54.500
initiatives they're doing within their own sector, their own industry. So all these alarmists who are
00:04:00.200
saying, well, what else are you going to do? There's nothing else but the carbon tax. It's simply not
00:04:04.920
true. The facts don't bear it. Now, I can go on and on about various problems with the carbon tax and
00:04:11.360
how much I really loathe the thing. And I've been writing about that for years. But I think what's
00:04:16.140
most interesting right now is we're at this point, this sort of strike point where people who don't
00:04:21.640
like this tax should be driving home the point, look, this is so divided right now. It is not good for
00:04:28.540
the country. We've got premiers being elected, making clear they don't like this thing. We've got
00:04:33.500
court battles going on, arguments galore, just drop it. Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna,
00:04:39.400
well, the liberals need to do what they did with electoral reform and acknowledge, well,
00:04:43.100
we gave it the old college try and it just didn't work. The time to abandon the carbon tax is right
00:04:50.400
now. And the liberals can still say they care about the environment and introduce some different
00:04:54.840
measures and different initiatives, but not this. It's too tarnished. And now is the moment to acknowledge