Juno News - September 09, 2023


Why haven’t Trudeau’s carbon taxes prevented wildfires？

Topics
carbon tax effectiveness
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Steven Guilbeault Pierre Pauyev
Welcome to Olivia Chow’s Toronto Are the Conservatives more united than ever？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

180.8

Word count

742

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Stephen Gilbeau, the gentleman who scaled buildings in Toronto in the interest of climate justice and eventually became a Cabinet Minister, came to accuse the Conservatives of not having an adequate plan for the climate. He was gracious enough to spend some time talking to reporters and I asked him why it was incumbent on Canadians to live in energy poverty when Canadians could get rid of the entirety of their emissions and barely blip on the global picture.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 I'm here at the Conservative Party of Canada 2023 convention in Quebec City.
00:00:05.260 More than 2,500 Conservative members descending on this convention centre from across the country.
00:00:11.620 And not all of them, I should say, are Conservatives.
00:00:14.320 One of the attendees this morning was Stephen Gilbeau.
00:00:18.040 You may remember him as the gentleman who scales buildings in Toronto in the interest of climate justice
00:00:24.200 and also eventually became a Cabinet Minister.
00:00:26.580 He came to accuse the Conservatives of not having an adequate plan for the climate.
00:00:32.460 Now, he was gracious enough to spend some time talking to reporters
00:00:35.700 and I asked him why it was incumbent on Canadians to live in energy poverty
00:00:40.780 when Canadians could get rid of the entirety of their emissions and barely blip on the global picture.
00:00:47.980 Canada's carbon emissions are less than 2% of the world's.
00:00:51.020 If every Canadian were to give up their cars and shut their electricity off,
00:00:54.600 it would make no difference compared to what China and other big powerhouses are.
00:00:58.900 So why are you content putting Canadians into energy poverty when it doesn't even solve a global problem?
00:01:05.060 If you look at what's happening in Canada, Canada is a success story when looking at investment in clean technologies.
00:01:12.160 In fact, Alberta is a Canadian success story when looking at investment in clean technologies and renewable energy.
00:01:21.260 70% of the investments we've seen in the last year in renewable energy has been in Alberta.
00:01:26.820 I find it baffling that the Premier would put a stop to $30 billion worth of clean technology investment in her province.
00:01:37.520 Canada is an energy powerhouse.
00:01:39.000 If I can go to China, if I can go to India and say we all have to work together to fight climate change
00:01:45.320 because we're all in this together, it's because we're doing our homework here.
00:01:48.940 We're doing what we need to do to tackle climate change and climate pollution.
00:01:52.780 As you heard, his answer is effectively that Canadians need to lead by example
00:01:56.580 so that when he goes to China, he can show them all the great things Canada is doing.
00:02:01.100 Except China is not doing that.
00:02:03.000 We actually see China ramping up coal production, ramping up industrialization, and its emissions continuing to increase.
00:02:10.720 So again, Canadians are the ones who are dealing with the consequences of what is oftentimes very radical environmental policy
00:02:17.460 in pursuit of aims that are not being shared by the people who are the source of what the Liberal government in Canada says is the problem.
00:02:24.680 But Stephen Gilboa went further to that.
00:02:26.300 He accused the Conservative inaction on climate, or at least his perception of that,
00:02:31.180 as facilitating the wave of hurricanes and wildfires that we've seen.
00:02:36.060 Now, obviously, wildfires are a concern.
00:02:39.040 Oftentimes, we can't easily link them to climate change.
00:02:42.000 Just this week, for example, a gentleman was charged criminally with arson in connection to Quebec wildfires.
00:02:48.940 But I asked him, if we go along with this narrative that climate inaction from Conservative politicians is responsible for these events,
00:02:55.700 while the Liberals have been in government for eight years now, they have a very sweeping national carbon tax.
00:03:02.140 I decided to ask him why that hasn't stopped it.
00:03:04.800 You mentioned extreme events like wildfires and hurricanes.
00:03:07.260 Why has your carbon tax not stopped those things, if that is the answer to these problems?
00:03:11.160 This question, which I've heard in the House of Commons by many Conservative Party members, including Pierre Poyev,
00:03:17.760 is yet another example of the fundamental disbelief that you have in climate science, and in science, full stop.
00:03:26.040 We won't solve climate change overnight, and we certainly won't solve climate change with empty slogans.
00:03:31.700 It's going to take years of hard work to tackle this environmental crisis.
00:03:35.440 And the fact that you believe that somehow we can flick a switch on a wall and everything's going to be fine,
00:03:40.960 just shows how the total ignorance that you and many others have when it comes to the issue of climate change.
00:03:47.860 As you can hear there, he turns it around and blames those who deny science as being the problem.
00:03:53.180 There's no switch to flip, yet even so, the Liberals seem to put a lot of stock in the idea that we can tax our way out of this problem.
00:04:00.300 Well, all we can do is tax more Canadians into energy poverty. 0.69
00:04:03.620 For True North, from Quebec City, I'm Andrew Lawton.