EDITORIAL: Carney is Trudeau version 2.0

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We should all want our prime minister to be successful — whether it’s Liberal Leader Mark Carney as of Friday, or the winner of a rapidly approaching federal election.

The problem is that, as the world’s pre-eminent corporate lobbyist for global carbon taxes and reducing Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, Carney supports policies that will be bad for all Canadians.

In this context, Carney is Justin Trudeau version 2.0.

His promise to “scrap” Trudeau’s “consumer carbon tax” is misleading because he will actually fold it into Trudeau’s industrial carbon tax, which will hide its true costs from Canadians.

He has yet to explain how reforms he says he will make to “improve and tighten” Trudeau’s industrial carbon tax will transform it into a magical tax that will make “big polluters” pay without passing along their increased costs to Canadians in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

Carney will also introduce a second carbon tax — a tariff Canadians will pay on many imported goods — described as a “border adjustment mechanism.”

That Carney is advocating a new tariff on Canadians at the same time that U.S. President Donald Trump is imposing new and unjustified tariffs on Canadians defies logic and reason.

On Wednesday, Yves Giroux, parliament’s independent, non-partisan financial watchdog on government spending, said the Liberal government’s planned cap on emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector will eliminate 54,400 full-time jobs from the Canadian economy in 2030, reduce Canada’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.39% and nominal GDP by $20.5 billion in 2032.

Last year, the release of the Trudeau government’s own data on the combined negative impact of his consumer and industrial carbon taxes on the economy concluded they would reduce Canada’s GDP by almost 1%, or $25 billion, by 2030.

Our inability to get Canada’s vast oil and natural gas resources to tidewater and from there to global markets means we have to sell them at a huge discount to the United States.

This costs our economy billions of dollars every year, a further negative impact on Canada’s economic growth.

Canadians should ask themselves whether a prime minister devoted to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 — just as his predecessor was — is the best choice to lead Canada today.