The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 16, 2024


Liberals LIE about the purpose of the carbon tax

Topics
climate tax effectiveness middle-class jobs climate tax promises
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Steven Guilbeault Milton Friedman Pierre Poilievre Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole
Women strongly dislike Justin Trudeau Justin Trudeau can't shut his mouth

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

189.65

Word count

1,919

Sentence count

107

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada are trying to get rid of a carbon tax that was introduced in Canada in order to combat climate change. They argue that the tax is a way to help fight climate change, but is it actually working? In this episode of the podcast, I discuss what the carbon tax actually does and why it should be scrapped.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Based on their attacks of Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev's promise to get rid of the federal carbon tax, the Justin Trudeau liberals have proven that either they don't actually know how their own carbon tax works, or they're lying.
00:00:11.820 I think it's a little bit of both. The liberals in some instances will say that their carbon tax is a price on pollution meant to incentivize people to drive less and then thus reduce carbon emissions, helping the climate in some vague way.
00:00:24.280 And then in other instances, they will argue that the rebates that people get back are actually greater than the cost of the carbon tax, and thus the carbon tax is actually a wealth redistribution program meant to help those not as well off as others.
00:00:37.680 So which is it? I've seen these tweets being put out by both the Liberal Party's official account as well as the Minister of Environment, Stephen Gilbeau.
00:00:45.780 Stephen Gilbeau posted this,
00:00:47.580 Putting a price on pollution helps reduce pollution and strengthen our economy. Polyev would take away their rebate payments, helping millions of Canadians while removing one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis.
00:00:58.980 It can't be both. You can't try and disincentivize someone from driving their vehicle with a tax just to give them back even more money than that tax is costing them.
00:01:10.840 And even then, in reality, let's just debunk this stupid myth. Yes, some people will get more back in rebates than they pay at the gasoline pump, but that's only one aspect of the carbon tax effect on the economy.
00:01:25.940 All products are affected by the carbon tax, but the liberals only focus on gasoline costs and sort of heating costs on consumers.
00:01:32.900 They don't focus on food and other products and services that have to be shipped, anything else that requires, you know, energy to create.
00:01:41.000 That's something that the liberals never take into account on the calculus they do.
00:01:45.200 And again, so how are people drive like how is it like helping reduce emissions or tackle the climate crisis if you're giving people the money back so the actual negative effect of driving is not nearly as present?
00:02:00.000 Anyways, but then we also had the Liberal Party of Canada on its own Twitter account put out this, climate change is real and Canadians know we need real action to deliver clean air and a strong economy.
00:02:11.660 Okay, one, Canada has clean air. Can we stop with the idea that somehow we're putting into place regulations that were maybe needed in the early 70s in the United States where there were smog issues?
00:02:23.260 We do not have smog issues in our country anymore.
00:02:26.100 The issue that the liberals are trying to tackle with the carbon tax is very vague and nebulous issues of carbon emissions that have some effect on the climate but are pretty minor overall.
00:02:38.260 And Canada is not really that big of a contributor to climate change if we're to assume it's a purely carbon issue just based on the amount of green space our country has.
00:02:48.240 But sorry, getting back to the tweet, the Liberal Party account goes on to say, while we're moving forward, pure poly of still has no plan for the environment and our economy.
00:02:58.060 And then under the pure poly of section of this graphic, it says, make pollution free again.
00:03:02.800 Okay, just on that one aspect, I'm actually happy that we are making it free to pollute because guess what, living life causes pollution.
00:03:10.980 And we shouldn't be taxing each citizen for the fact that they have to live life.
00:03:15.680 Yes, if you're dumping sewage in a river like Quebec, like Vancouver Island, maybe that should be taxed a little bit.
00:03:22.420 If you're dumping smog into the air and it's like visibly black and it's actually affecting other people, you should maybe have to pay for that. 0.94
00:03:28.980 The thing is that the carbon tax itself is not actually tackling anything that has anything to do with real pollution.
00:03:35.400 And if we're considering that pollution that needs to be taxed, you could tax anything.
00:03:40.040 It's crazy all the stuff you could tax.
00:03:41.840 You could have an extra garbage tax and not just the garbage removal tax, just the fact that you're creating garbage.
00:03:47.140 We could have waste taxes.
00:03:48.800 We could have tons of different little taxes just from the fact that you have to live a 24-hour day and you're going to create some amount of pollution in the world. 0.60
00:03:57.780 But another thing also, I always hate when people bring up the idea, you know, Milton Friedman was in favor of a carbon tax.
00:04:03.240 Yes, in the 70s, when there were smog issues in cities because cars didn't do a great job of filtering out the gasoline that they were burning and like emitting the exhaust. 0.71
00:04:15.060 That's a stupid argument to pretend that Milton Friedman would be in favor of a liberal-style carbon tax.
00:04:21.640 But moving on here, the next one says, scrapped Canada's climate plan. 0.98
00:04:25.500 How have we actually done on the climate plan anyways?
00:04:28.480 Have we reduced emissions?
00:04:29.840 No.
00:04:30.260 Have we made the environment cleaner in any actual measurable way?
00:04:34.900 Not really.
00:04:35.960 So what's the point?
00:04:37.140 Canadians are actually for that because guess what that climate plan represents?
00:04:40.860 Billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money.
00:04:44.240 And Canadians are not scared of cuts these days.
00:04:46.600 They realize that the Canadian government spends too much and taxes too much and they would like that all reduced.
00:04:53.000 The last one says, lose middle-class jobs.
00:04:55.800 Middle-class jobs, what private sector, organic, middle-class jobs are being like gotten rid of because we get rid of the carbon tax?
00:05:05.160 None.
00:05:05.920 Are you talking about government created just subsidy jobs?
00:05:09.780 Maybe.
00:05:10.360 Who cares?
00:05:10.800 I don't want those to remain.
00:05:12.120 That's insane that we are just relying on the government to create fake jobs for people and pretending like that's economic growth.
00:05:19.120 Government sector jobs are not real jobs because there's no real productivity tied to those jobs.
00:05:24.620 Some government roles and some government jobs are absolutely necessary.
00:05:28.640 Obviously, the police is a great example.
00:05:30.760 But a lot of the jobs that liberals are creating are just strains on the economy.
00:05:35.380 It is taking money from other people to employ someone to do something that nobody asked for.
00:05:39.820 But then on the liberal side of the graphic, it says liberals plan for clean air and strong economy.
00:05:46.860 Fight climate change with a price on pollution that puts more money in Canadians' pockets.
00:05:51.060 Again, the logic of that statement that we are going to give you more money trying to disincentivize you from doing a specific behavior.
00:05:58.780 And let me say, gasoline is an inelastic good.
00:06:02.400 People in most parts of the country cannot live without fueling up their car.
00:06:06.640 You think people, if you raise the carbon tax enough, are just going to stop fueling their car and walk to work?
00:06:12.120 I'm in Calgary.
00:06:13.200 That's impossible.
00:06:14.600 I'm going to keep buying gasoline.
00:06:17.000 Unless you make it so prohibitively expensive that is actively just too expensive for me to even purchase, like it's $100 a liter, I'm still going to buy it because I need to get around.
00:06:27.120 The second part, to finish up on that, one, you can't disincentivize people from using a product they need.
00:06:34.880 You can't disincentivize people from buying food and clothing unless it's like luxury goods.
00:06:40.000 And two, when you're giving people more money back, supposedly, with the carbon tax through their rebates, what's the disincentive there?
00:06:48.500 Even if it wasn't an inelastic good, if you were being brought back up to par after your rebates given to you, you wouldn't be disincentivized from driving whatsoever.
00:06:58.160 So the next point says, create middle-class jobs by making Canada a global leader in clean economy.
00:07:04.720 No, that is called the leader in subsidies.
00:07:07.980 The EV factories that we have, the battery factories we have in Canada are ridiculous.
00:07:12.340 It is literally just stealing money from Canadians to pay for a job that we know that nobody asked for someone to do.
00:07:18.860 That is the definition of theft in terms of you are taking money from taxpayers to pretend like you are doing something that is benefiting Canadians.
00:07:27.140 You are basically buying votes by employing a bunch of people or incentivizing an entire district to vote for you because you created jobs in the area when they're fake jobs.
00:07:36.400 That's not compassionate. That's actually fairly deceptive and nasty to do to the rest of the country.
00:07:43.800 It's great if you live in that area, but we're not supposed to be a country where all we do is think about our own local benefits to the detriment of everyone else.
00:07:52.360 And then it says, clean our environment by planting 2 billion trees and protecting our oceans.
00:07:57.620 Remember when his goal was more than 2 billion? Have we planted any trees?
00:08:01.120 I keep hearing reports coming out where we haven't planted a single one, and I really doubt that he's just been planting hundreds of thousands of trees behind our back, and we just didn't know about it up to this point.
00:08:11.920 He would have been ballyhooing that achievement if it was real, but the tree promise is as substantive as the other carbon tax promises.
00:08:22.080 They haven't done anything, but we'll just claim that we did it because we claimed we did good thing, and the conservatives are not going to do that good thing so we can attack them for it.
00:08:30.840 Just because something is put in positive language does not mean it's good, but that is what a lot of the climate alarmist, environmentalist crowd in Canada is obsessed with.
00:08:41.080 Good-sounding language with no care about what the real results are.
00:08:45.740 Anyways, good thing I got that rant off my chest.
00:08:48.880 Anyways, that's it for me today.
00:08:50.520 I have my usual give, send, go.
00:08:52.280 I'll just link in the description below.
00:08:54.060 It's for my legal case.
00:08:55.500 There's some crazy billionaire suing me for no reason, suing myself in the National Telegraph for defamation, a defamation he cannot prove, and there was multiple other outlets who said the same thing about him, which is factually verifiable, like, well before we had printed anything.
00:09:09.000 And then also I'm running for the riding of Calgary-Signal Hill, the conservative party nomination.
00:09:14.420 So if you live in Calgary-Signal Hill, vote for me in that area by buying a conservative party membership and voting for me number one on the ballot whenever the nomination date gets set and that you would show up in person and, you know, fill out a ranked ballot.
00:09:26.660 But there's a lot of red Tories running in these safe seats trying to snag a conservative nomination.
00:09:31.900 There's a lot of liberals who know that they can't win as liberals in these safe seats so that they just end up going into the conservative nominations.
00:09:39.180 When they were, like, massive backers of Aaron O'Toole, they thought that pure polio's, you know, policies were radical just a few years ago, and they're pretending to be really on the, like, the more reform-minded movement these days when they're, like, the biggest naysayers of real conservatism throughout their entire history.
00:09:56.280 In politics.
00:09:57.840 Anyway, sorry, now I'm starting to lean into another rant there.
00:10:01.180 It's addictive for me.
00:10:02.380 So that should be it for me today, and I hope everyone has a great night, and I'll definitely see you back here tomorrow.