People who don’t understand lame-duck Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies — apparently including most Liberal politicians and their spin doctors — think it’s going to be easy to dismantle them.
That all they have to do is get rid of the consumer fuel tax that raises the cost of gasoline, natural gas and 20 other forms of fossil-fuel energy every year and all will be well.
That it won’t be an issue in the coming election for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre because the Liberals have cleverly side-stepped it, given that Trudeau is resigning and the major Liberal leadership contenders to replace him, Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland, are saying they’ll come up with new and improved policies to cut emissions.
Simply put, what fools these Liberals be, a new report by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute says.
Written by University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, who has been studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s, the report reminds us that no one in Liberal land is talking about abandoning Trudeau’s goal of having Canada achieve “net-zero” industrial greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That plan includes, so far, 149 government programs to cut emissions — of which the consumer fuel tax is just one — plus onerous new, expensive government regulations and massive subsidies to the private sector for building, among other things, new electric vehicle plants and EV battery plants.
The federal government alone has committed more than $200 billion to these programs in addition to billions more being contributed by provinces like Ontario.
This is happening while the U.S., which has never had a national carbon tax, has President Donald Trump urging America’s giant oil and gas sector to “drill, baby, drill” and “frack, baby, frack” while he’s cancelling EV mandates and green subsidies.
McKitrick’s report, Canada’s Path to Net Zero by 2050: Darkness at the End of the Tunnel, explains how damaging to our economy achieving net-zero emissions would be — or rather, failing to achieve them because given current levels of technology, he says, they’re impossible to hit.
“Ottawa’s emission-reduction plan will significantly hurt Canada’s economy, but it won’t achieve the target they’ve set because it’s infeasible,” McKitrick says.
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Using economic modelling, McKitrick estimates that by 2050, the Liberals’ net-zero target will reduce the size of the Canadian economy by 6.2%, workers will make $8,000 less annually and there will be 254,000 fewer jobs.
Even with a carbon tax of $1,200 per tonne of emissions that would add $2.70 per litre to the cost of gasoline alone, McKitrick says, Canada will fall short of its net-zero target by 30%, while causing economic suffering so profound it’s doubtful the public would tolerate it.
Finally, even if Canada was to fully comply with its commitments under the United Nations Paris climate agreement, McKitrick says, our contribution to global emissions is so small that it would only reduce global warming — or if you prefer, climate change — by less than a hundredth of a degree Celsius by 2100.
“Despite political rhetoric, Ottawa’s emission-reduction policies will impose enormous costs without even meeting the government’s target,” McKitrick said.
“As the U.S. moves aggressively to unleash its energy sector, Canadian policymakers need to rethink the damage these policies will inflict on Canadians and change course.”
McKitrick notes it is possible new technologies between now and 2050 will significantly reduce the cost of cutting emissions, but that’s speculation at this point.