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.
00:00:00.000Based 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.
00:00:11.820I 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.
00:00:24.280And 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.
00:00:37.680So 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.
00:00:47.580Putting 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.
00:00:58.980It 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.
00:01:10.840And 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.
00:01:25.940All products are affected by the carbon tax, but the liberals only focus on gasoline costs and sort of heating costs on consumers.
00:01:32.900They don't focus on food and other products and services that have to be shipped, anything else that requires, you know, energy to create.
00:01:41.000That's something that the liberals never take into account on the calculus they do.
00:01:45.200And 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?
00:02:00.000Anyways, 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.
00:02:11.660Okay, 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?
00:02:23.260We do not have smog issues in our country anymore.
00:02:26.100The 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.
00:02:38.260And 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.
00:02:48.240But 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.
00:02:58.060And then under the pure poly of section of this graphic, it says, make pollution free again.
00:03:02.800Okay, just on that one aspect, I'm actually happy that we are making it free to pollute because guess what, living life causes pollution.
00:03:10.980And we shouldn't be taxing each citizen for the fact that they have to live life.
00:03:15.680Yes, if you're dumping sewage in a river like Quebec, like Vancouver Island, maybe that should be taxed a little bit.
00:03:22.420If 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.
00:03:28.980The thing is that the carbon tax itself is not actually tackling anything that has anything to do with real pollution.
00:03:35.400And if we're considering that pollution that needs to be taxed, you could tax anything.
00:03:40.040It's crazy all the stuff you could tax.
00:03:41.840You could have an extra garbage tax and not just the garbage removal tax, just the fact that you're creating garbage.
00:03:48.800We 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.
00:03:57.780But another thing also, I always hate when people bring up the idea, you know, Milton Friedman was in favor of a carbon tax.
00:04:03.240Yes, 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.
00:04:15.060That's a stupid argument to pretend that Milton Friedman would be in favor of a liberal-style carbon tax.
00:04:21.640But moving on here, the next one says, scrapped Canada's climate plan.
00:04:25.500How have we actually done on the climate plan anyways?
00:06:17.000Unless 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.
00:06:27.120The second part, to finish up on that, one, you can't disincentivize people from using a product they need.
00:06:34.880You can't disincentivize people from buying food and clothing unless it's like luxury goods.
00:06:40.000And two, when you're giving people more money back, supposedly, with the carbon tax through their rebates, what's the disincentive there?
00:06:48.500Even 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.
00:06:58.160So the next point says, create middle-class jobs by making Canada a global leader in clean economy.
00:07:04.720No, that is called the leader in subsidies.
00:07:07.980The EV factories that we have, the battery factories we have in Canada are ridiculous.
00:07:12.340It is literally just stealing money from Canadians to pay for a job that we know that nobody asked for someone to do.
00:07:18.860That 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.
00:07:27.140You 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.
00:07:36.400That's not compassionate. That's actually fairly deceptive and nasty to do to the rest of the country.
00:07:43.800It'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.
00:07:52.360And then it says, clean our environment by planting 2 billion trees and protecting our oceans.
00:07:57.620Remember when his goal was more than 2 billion? Have we planted any trees?
00:08:01.120I 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.
00:08:11.920He would have been ballyhooing that achievement if it was real, but the tree promise is as substantive as the other carbon tax promises.
00:08:22.080They 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.
00:08:30.840Just 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.
00:08:41.080Good-sounding language with no care about what the real results are.
00:08:45.740Anyways, good thing I got that rant off my chest.
00:08:55.500There'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.
00:09:09.000And then also I'm running for the riding of Calgary-Signal Hill, the conservative party nomination.
00:09:14.420So 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.
00:09:26.660But there's a lot of red Tories running in these safe seats trying to snag a conservative nomination.
00:09:31.900There'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.
00:09:39.180When 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.