The reason the federal Liberals can never be trusted on the carbon tax is that even as they seemingly abandon it, they refuse to admit they were wrong to introduce it.
Instead of apologizing to Canadians for their half-baked, poorly explained policy that divided the country, while they insulted anyone who opposed it as wanting to let the planet burn, the Liberals even now refuse to accept responsibility for what they did.
In announcing what he described as his new climate change plan on Friday, basically Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s old climate change plan with a few tweaks led by scrapping a relatively minor component of it known as the consumer fuel charge – while retaining its much larger industrial carbon pricing component – Liberal leadership frontrunner Mark Carney blamed its demise on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
“When Pierre Poilievre says we have to choose between fighting climate change and growing our economy, he’s lying to us,” Carney alleged, adding public opposition to the carbon tax was “fed by misinformation and lies quite frankly by the leader of the opposition.”
Accusing Poilievre of lying when you were a global cheerleader for carbon taxes up to a couple of coffees ago – even complaining they weren’t high enough – shows a staggering degree of tone deafness and lack of understanding of how the public would perceive such a startling reversal.
Political death-bed repentances are seldom convincing and a logical interpretation of this one would be that either Carney was lying then, or he’s lying now, about his support for the carbon tax. Or, at best, that he’s just another politician who will say anything to get elected.
On Friday, Carney told enthralled Liberals as he announced his “new” climate change plan, “I’m not a politician. I’m becoming a politician, but I’m not a politician,” apparently unaware that this is exactly how politicians talk – in doubletalk.
Warming to his theme, he continued, “because I’m not a politician I don’t like press releases that are dressed up as policies” – even though the press release he put out accompanying his policy reversal on the carbon tax was literally a press release dressed up as a policy.
While loaded with aspirational language, it contained no data on Carney’s timelines for reducing industrial greenhouse gases, nothing about targets, nothing about costs, stating only that, “in the coming weeks we will outline major additional economic measures to strengthen the economy and ensure households are immediately better off, following the removal of the (carbon tax) rebate.”
Carney, like Trudeau in 2019 when he brought in the Liberals’ carbon tax, continues to insist there’s some magical formula out there – maybe it’s hidden in Never-Never Land or Narnia – in which the added, new cost of paying for industrial greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t end up being paid by the public, either in higher taxes or higher prices on consumer goods created using fossil fuel energy.
To the contrary, in this Never Never Land – insist both Trudeau and Carney – “big polluters” responsible for emissions don’t pass along their added costs imposed by government to the public.
This is similar to the logic of federal, provincial and municipal governments which ignore the cumulative costs they are imposing on Canadians, ostensibly to “fight climate change,” refusing to acknowledge the inescapable reality that in the end, there is only one taxpayer.
In blaming Poilievre for the failure of the Liberals’ carbon tax debacle, Carney is implicitly blaming Canadians for falling for what he describes as Poilievre’s lies.
This in turn, so this logic goes, prevented the Liberals’ from implementing their grand scheme to reduce emissions, even though that scheme has failed to reduce them to anywhere near the fantastical targets promised by the Liberals in a government that has never met a single emission target it has set for itself.
The underlying political philosophy of both Carney and Trudeau on this issue was perfectly explained three decades ago in the seminal work of the great American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell, who described the prevailing liberal vision of our time in his book, The Vision of the Anointed, Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
Followers of the vision, Sowell explained, consider themselves on a higher moral plane than their opponents, whom they consider not only wrong but motivated by evil intentions and that “problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.”
No matter how many times the end result of their visions are contradicted by real-world evidence.