Western Standard - June 08, 2023


BC's carbon tax, a monstrous scam

Gloves off between Trudeau & Poilievre Premier Danielle Smith’s new cabinet

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

197.29

Word count

582

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Learn English with Christy Clark. Christy Clark is the Premier of British Columbia, Canada's largest and most important province, and one of the cleanest and greenest in the world. She is also the first female premier in the country to become premier of a major industrialized province and has been in office for less than a year.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.160 I was part of the government in 2008, don't throw things at me, that brought in North 1.00
00:00:06.060 America's first revenue neutral carbon tax, right here in British Columbia, and I'm very
00:00:09.820 proud of that, I have to tell you.
00:00:11.400 Now, why am I proud of that?
00:00:12.880 Because it was revenue neutral.
00:00:14.520 What does that mean?
00:00:15.140 It means that by law, every nickel that came in under the carbon tax had to be returned
00:00:20.460 to you in the form of lower personal income taxes and lower business taxes, because we
00:00:25.600 wanted to make sure it was a tax shift, not a tax grab.
00:00:30.000 What I worry about with a lot of politicians when it comes to the environment is, it all
00:00:34.460 of a sudden ends up being taking more money out of your pockets, and people get angry at
00:00:38.820 that, and they get resentful.
00:00:40.760 And the revenue neutral carbon tax, I'm sorry to say, is no longer revenue neutral, because
00:00:44.300 when the NDP got in power, the first thing they did is said, no way we're giving money
00:00:48.160 back to people, because they don't like that.
00:00:50.140 That's called a tax cut, they don't like reducing taxes.
00:00:53.260 And so they're now taking it all into government, and it's billions of dollars.
00:00:57.560 And I've been very clear, in the first 90 days of becoming Premier of this province, we're
00:01:02.820 going back to revenue neutral.
00:01:04.460 And that is billions of dollars, by the way, that's going to go right back into your pocket
00:01:07.940 in the form of lower taxes, and it will be immediate, and it will be noticed.
00:01:12.200 And that's the right thing to do, because it's a tax shift.
00:01:14.640 But you know, there are other things we could do.
00:01:21.380 We are blessed in British Columbia, that all the natural minerals and resources needed to
00:01:26.400 get us, the planet, to that green future, are actually located right here in the province
00:01:30.940 of British Columbia.
00:01:31.640 It is an unbelievable gift.
00:01:33.660 We have an opportunity to help the world transition to a greener future.
00:01:38.060 So, for example, in China and India, where coal-fired power is their mainstay for generating
00:01:44.060 power, it is the dirtiest form you could possibly imagine.
00:01:48.500 Very bad for the planet.
00:01:50.340 But we also have liquid-fired natural gas that we can transport to China and India, transition
00:01:56.780 them off of their coal-fired power, and that is the equivalent of reducing emissions by 50%.
00:02:02.180 And some purists will tell you, well, that's still not good enough, because you shouldn't
00:02:06.060 do any fossil fuel production here.
00:02:07.820 But I say we have an obligation, because we are part of global citizenry, to do our bit.
00:02:13.200 And you know what?
00:02:13.980 A 50% reduction in Asia is like parked in every car permanently in Canada. 0.91
00:02:18.760 That's a pretty damn good outcome.
00:02:20.660 So I say let's do it.
00:02:22.160 Let's help them get their way.
00:02:23.680 And the other thing is, a lot of the natural resources we have, whether it's copper or
00:02:27.760 palladium, whatever the case may be, that are needed for batteries and windmills and
00:02:33.440 solar panels and all the rest of it, are found right here in British Columbia.
00:02:37.220 And we sustainably mine it.
00:02:39.280 So let's make sure that we're getting those resources from a place that sustainably mines
00:02:43.820 it, not like some of these places in the world that exploit workers, have no environmental
00:02:49.220 sensitivities whatsoever.
00:02:51.100 That's our added advantage that I think can help us solve a lot of these problems that
00:02:56.060 the world's grappling with.