GOLDSTEIN: Carney’s ‘new’ climate change plan a word-salad of nonsense

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Leading Liberal leadership contender Mark Carney unveiled his new climate change plan Friday accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of lying to Canadians by telling them they have to choose between the environment and the economy, and then he told Canadians a far bigger whopper of his own.

Carney claimed he’s come up with a new, magical system for paying the costs of lowering industrial greenhouse gas emissions where only the “big polluters” pay while average Canadians end up better off financially.

Never mind that this is exactly the same discredited claim Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made to Canadians when he introduced his national carbon tax in 2019 that Carney – who used to be a passionate advocate of carbon taxes, arguing they weren’t high enough – now says he’ll immediately scrap as PM because it’s become too divisive.

In the real world, Carney knows when you charge people for something they’ve never had to pay for before – in this case emitting industrial greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – someone has to pay and it’s always the public through either higher taxes or higher prices as “big polluters” pass their increased costs on to us.

Indeed, as far as the federal government is concerned, all of us are the “big polluters” because we buy the goods and services that are made using fossil fuel energy – the lion’s share of it for most people spent on necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, gasoline for transportation, natural gas for heating homes in winter, and 20 other forms of fossil fuel energy needed to power a big, cold, northern country like our own.

Simply put, there is no free lunch. There never has been. There never will be.

The rest of Carney’s half-baked proposals, containing few specifics – those, we’re told, will come later – are all rehashed methods of reducing emissions that to date have left Canada nowhere near hitting the Trudeau government’s fantasy emission reduction targets, having never hit a single one so far.

Carney said while scrapping the consumer carbon tax, he’ll retain and improve Trudeau’s much larger output-based pricing system for large industrial emitters – essentially a cap-and-trade system, which is another form of a carbon tax.

He says this improved system by which industries will be able to save money by pursuing ways to lower emissions will result in a bigger buy-in by corporations and global markets, when in the real world, 10 major Canadian and U.S. banks just quit Carney’s Net Zero Banking Alliance and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero to reduce global emissions to net zero by 2050.

This in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president and his marching orders to the U.S. oil and gas sector to “drill, baby, drill” and “frack, baby frack.”

Carney said he’ll replace the consumer carbon tax’s rebate system which he claimed left most Canadian households paying the tax better off – disputed by Canada’s independent, non-partisan parliamentary budget officer, who says that isn’t true when one factors in the economic damage carbon taxes cause – with numerous financial incentives from the government for people to do things like retrofit their homes to make them more energy efficient, buy energy-saving clean technology products and purchase electric vehicles and heat pumps that will all save them money in the long run.

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In the real world, the Trudeau government has been doing all that through 149 government programs to which it has already committed more than $200 billon, leaving Canada, yet again, nowhere near the government’s targets of reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050.

Finally, in the category of truth is stranger than fiction, Carney said he will create a “carbon border adjustment system” that – wait for it – would impose tariffs on imported goods coming into Canada if the government concludes their countries of origin aren’t doing enough to fight climate change.

Alternatively, Canadian companies exporting goods to other countries under this system, could receive export rebates to defray their costs when marketing goods in foreign countries where companies face less stringent carbon pricing than in Canada.

Carbon border adjustments are intended to reduce “carbon leakage” where industries leave a country with stringent carbon pricing and set up operations in other countries with fewer or no regulations.

Again, this is nothing new – the Trudeau government has talked about introducing carbon border adjustments for years, but never acted on it, presumably because it doesn’t think it will work.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com