What’s up with Canada?

Climate Change

  • If Canadian celebrities have taught us anything, it’s that if you want to make it big in Canada, you need to make it big in America first.

    Perhaps that’s what Justin Trudeau was thinking when he decided to do The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

    The decision would’ve been a no-brainer back in his Trudeaumania days. But Trudeau’s no longer a popular new politician offering change; he’s an unpopular old one opposing it.

    Trudeau may still be revered by American progressives who think he’s making Canada a fairer society. But now, thanks to Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, he’s also reviled by American conservatives who think he’s making Canada a “communist shithole.”

    Granted, Colbert probably doesn’t get his Canadian news from red-pill podcasts. On the other hand, the last time Colbert talked about Trudeau on his show was in a segment called “Oh, Canada” featuring that photo of the prime minister in brownface at a party when he was 29.

    And even in the best-case scenario, Trudeau would certainly get criticized for doing it. The Conservatives call him “Jet-Setting Justin” and “high-carbon hypocrite” whenever he leaves Ottawa – let alone when it’s to go on TV after speaking at the UN in New York.

    And in the worst-case scenario, he could totally bomb.

    Nevertheless, in an act of either supreme confidence or supreme desperation, the Canadian prime minister made his debut on American late-night.

    So, how did he do? Well, considering he’s down by around 20% in national polls and facing the threat of a snap election: shockingly well.

    He explained Canada to Americans: our culture is a “tapestry,” not a “melting pot”; our foreign policy is about collaboration, not conquest; our leader is called “Prime Minister,” not “Mr. President”; et cetera. While it wasn’t a novel pitch, his salesmanship was charismatic and convincing – assuming, of course, you don’t already think he’s full of shit and can’t stand his face.

    Setting aside the question of likeability, Trudeau did well on questions about foreign policy.

    When Colbert asked about the most boring disagreement between two countries in the history of the world – the softwood-lumber dispute – Trudeau answered diplomatically, “You guys are paying too much for your lumber because you’ve got tariffs on it – and that doesn’t make any sense, so we keep trying to point that out for you.”

    When Colbert asked about Americans coming over the border to buy cheaper drugs, Trudeau answered diplomatically, “We’re happy to try and help you out – but it would be really easier if you guys had universal healthcare.”

    When Colbert asked about tensions between Canada and Russia over control over the Arctic, Trudeau answered diplomatically, “It’s a bit of a challenge” – to which Colbert remarked, “You just called Vladimir Putin ‘a bit of a challenge’; that is a Canadian understatement if I’ve ever heard it.”

    But perhaps most surprisingly, Trudeau even did well on questions about domestic affairs.

    When Colbert asked about Pierre Poilievre, saying that he’s heard him called “Canada’s Trump,” Trudeau didn’t endorse the comparison but replied, “My opponent is gaslighting us.”

    When Colbert asked why “nativism or far-right xenophobia might grow even in a country as polite as Canada,” Trudeau replied, “It’s a really tough time in Canada right now. People are hurting. People are having trouble paying for groceries, paying for rent.”

    When Colbert asked if the situation in Canada is similar to the one in America, Trudeau replied, “The housing crisis is a little sharper. Our economic outlook is slightly more positive than the United States right now. But people don’t feel it.”

    And when Colbert asked why the prime minister is so unpopular at home, Trudeau replied, “People are taking a lot out on me. For understandable reasons: I’ve been here, and I’ve been steering us through all these things. And people are sometimes looking at change.”

    But he wasn’t done: “The reality is, I deeply believe in continuing to fight climate change, and continuing to invest in people, and continuing to support people. And I’m going to keep fighting.”

    Trudeau claiming that the reason so many people hate him is because they’re in pain and need someone to blame – as opposed to claiming responsibility for Canada’s affordability crisis – will almost certainly make those people hate him even more.

    But there’s no denying that Canada has made a scapegoat of Justin Trudeau. Don’t believe me? Listen to the episode of The Daily about the American housing crisis that came out the morning after Trudeau’s Colbert appearance called How the Cost of Housing Became So Crushing.

    Spoiler: it wasn’t Trudeau’s fault.

    Trudeau tries to make it in New York

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  • Will the House of Commons make it to summer break before it breaks into theatrics?

    Here’s a movie-worthy quote from Pierre Poilievre in Question Period: “The Prime Minister, instead of defending his taxes, resorted to a really wacko and unhinged claim – that if Canadians just paid more taxes, there would suddenly be less fires. I thought that water, and not taxes, put out fires? Maybe the Prime Minister can clarify: How high would his tax have to go for forest fires to stop?”

    The Conservative leader evidently thought that was a pretty good line, since he repeated it twice. But just imagine applying Poilievre’s logic to his own policy positions.

    Take his ‘recovery, not free drugs’ solution for the overdose crisis: How high would his taxes for addiction treatment programs have to go to eliminate drugs?

    Or his ‘jail, not bail’ plan for repeat violent offenders and car thieves: How high would his taxes for police, courts and prisons have to go to eliminate crime?

    Of course, nobody thinks that Trudeau is trying to eliminate forest fires. Meanwhile, everybody knows that Poilievre is trying to eliminate the price on pollution.

    That’s why he asked the Prime Minister to “put aside his wacko ideology long enough to give Canadians a break by axing all the taxes on fuel for summer vacation,” claiming it would save average Canadian families $670 by Labour Day.

    But the Liberals crunched the numbers: With a maximum fuel tax of $0.32 per litre and an average fuel efficiency of 8.9 litres per kilometre, you would need to drive from Toronto to Vancouver and back multiple times to save that much money.

    Did the Conservatives admit their mistake? No. Instead, Poilievre accused the Liberals of going on “a wacko rant accusing parents who take their kids on a road trip of locking them up in a car for 10 days straight, without a washroom break, causing the whole world to burn.”

    And did the Conservatives change the subject? No. Ten MPs – including two from provinces where the federal carbon tax doesn’t even exist – stuck to their script, knowing they’d bomb, about how the Liberals ruined summer vacation.

    So did the Conservatives lose the plot? No. Because they’re no longer trying to hold the Liberals to account… they’re trying to make viral videos that rake in donations. And they’ve turned Question Period into their very own production studio.

    Once upon a time, when most Canadians got their political news from journalists on TV, getting humiliated in the House of Commons was something to avoid. But now that so many of us get it directly from politicians online, it’s something to ignore – or better yet, cut from the clip.

    At first, this shift was subtle. But the fourth wall was broken last week when a Liberal MP criticized a Conservative MP for looking at the camera while asking him a question. (The House Speaker, whom the Conservatives accuse of excessive partisanship, ruled that MPs can look wherever they want.)

    Of course, the Conservatives have more important things to worry about than roasting their rivals on social media. For example: Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference recently revealed that some MPs may have worked “wittingly” with China and India to influence election outcomes – including the Conservative leadership race that Poilievre won in a landslide.

    Right now, very little information has been released to the public. No MP has been named, and we don’t know how many are accused – let alone if the reports are credible. The RCMP hasn’t even confirmed whether they’ve launched criminal investigations into these alleged acts of what would absolutely be treason.

    Yet Poilievre, who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, knows nothing more about this than we do. And, insanely enough, that’s by personal choice! For more than a year, Poilievre has refused to obtain security clearance to receive classified information.

    He claims that Trudeau’s offer to share national secrets is actually a secret plot to muzzle him, since he wouldn’t be allowed to publicly discuss what he learned. But a more likely motivation for choosing to remain ignorant about threats to Canadian sovereignty is that Poilievre would prefer to attack the government than protect democracy.

    This is the man that the Conservatives have chosen to lead their party. He is their anti-woke warrior, their second coming of Stephen Harper, their Trudeau slayer… and they can almost taste those sweet leftist-Liberal tears.

    Poilievre wants to run away from Canada’s responsibility to mitigate climate change. He also wants to run roughshod over evidence-based approaches to reducing addiction and crime. And, most of all, he wants to run the country.

    But is that what Canadians want?

    Welcome to the Poilievre show

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  • Et tu, Jagmeet?

    Last week the NDP leader joined Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and several provincial premiers in calling for Justin Trudeau to kill Canada’s consumer carbon tax. But instead of stabbing the prime minister in the back, he shot himself in the foot.

    One day after Singh said that “we believe in making the big polluters pay and not having working people feel like they are the ones that are somehow having to shoulder this,” he shared a statement clarifying that “New Democrats have not changed our position on the consumer carbon price.”

    The operative word in Singh’s initial statement is “feel.” That’s because the debate over Canada’s price on pollution has left the realm of facts. Thanks to Poilievre’s incessant “axe the tax” rhetoric on social media, our national conversation has become all about the vibes.

    According to non-partisan analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 80% of Canadian households financially benefit from the policy. But according to a poll by Abacus Data, 55% of Canadians with an opinion oppose the tax – and 51% don’t even know that they’re receiving a rebate.

    Instead of attempting to have an adult conversation about a serious subject, Singh and Poilievre are trying to capitalize on the confusion by calling for the prime minister to hold a televised debate with the provincial premiers who are demanding that Trudeau cancel the consumer carbon price.

    They’re doing this despite the fact that Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who is breaking federal law by refusing to collect the tax, admitted last month that he already tried to come up with a better plan to meet Canada’s emission reduction targets – but was unable to.

    Then there’s Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who blames the consumer carbon price for the affordability crisis, despite the fact that he’s personally responsible for the policy by way of cancelling the cap-and-trade system that would have exempted Ontarians.

    And let’s not forget Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who is demanding that Trudeau cancel the consumer carbon price despite a 2021 video of her saying that she handles her family’s finances and that “I would say that I probably ended up better off with that transfer.”

    Poilievre and the premiers justify their position – despite the fact that most Canadians get more money from the rebate than they pay in the tax – by quoting the PBO’s finding that only one-in-five financially benefit once the policy’s broader economic impact is considered.

    But the broader economic impact is not increased inflation, despite what Poilievre and the premiers claim, because the Bank of Canada estimates that the carbon price contributes only 0.15% to the national rate.

    Instead, the PBO merely considers reduced economic activity in certain sectors, such as oil and gas. But the analysis doesn’t also consider increased economic activity in other sectors, such as green technology.

    More importantly, the analysis simply compares the economic impact of the federal carbon price with doing nothing to mitigate climate change – without also considering the corresponding economic costs of doing nothing to mitigate climate change.

    And perhaps most glaring of all, it doesn’t compare the cost of the Liberal plan with Conservative or NDP alternatives – because neither party has bothered to propose one.

    So, at least until they do, Trudeau’s plan is the best one we have. And while the consumer carbon price is just part of the government’s plan to reduce emissions, there’s no way Canada can hit its targets without it. The consumer carbon price is expected to contribute 8% to 9% of total reductions by 2030 – roughly equivalent to the total emissions produced by Manitoba or three Atlantic provinces.

    It’s utterly unsurprising that Poilievre would oppose the consumer carbon price in spite of these facts, considering that two thirds of his supporters either don’t believe that climate change is caused by human activity or don’t believe in climate change at all. But why would Singh want to distance his party from the best plan Canada has for transitioning to a net-zero carbon economy?

    Once upon a time, New Democrats represented progressive values and working-class interests while Conservatives represented regressive taxes and corporate interests – and Liberals tried to split the difference. But we are undergoing a great realignment in Canadian federal politics right now.

    Poilievre has been trying to court young people who can’t afford rent, let alone a mortgage. Trudeau has been trying to solve the climate crisis while lifting millions of Canadians out of poverty. Singh, meanwhile, has been trying to appeal to those extremely online people who are convinced that the biggest threats Canadians face are capitalism (as personified by Loblaws) and colonialism (as personified by Israel).

    So where does that leave the federal NDP?

    Embroiled in an identity crisis, if not an existential one. New Democrats now find themselves in their darkest timeline: the Conservatives have become the party of the working class; the Liberals have become the party of progressive values; and the NDP has become a party without a purpose.

    But hope is not lost. Singh just needs to stop paying attention to his social media timelines and start paying attention to the real-life timeline that we’re actually living in. And he needs to stop saying what he believes his social media followers want to hear – and start doing what his party’s long-time supporters believe is right.

    Singh is leading the NDP to irrelevance

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