EDITORIAL: Trudeau doubles down defending his carbon tax

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Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says the next time Canadians go to the polls it will be an election about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax and Trudeau appears ready to die on that hill.

Speaking at a Global Citizen conference in Rio de Janeiro leading up to this year’s G20 meeting, Trudeau said his job in the next election will be to convince Canadians that “they have to pay more in taxes, or they have to accept that some of their tax dollars are going to the most vulnerable in the world” to fight climate change, even as they face an affordability crisis at home.

“’It’s really, really easy’ when people are in short-term survival mode worried about being ‘able to pay the rent this month’ and ‘buy groceries for my kids to say ‘okay: let’s put climate change as a slightly lower priority,’” Trudeau said.

“And that’s something that’s instinctive, when the storm comes you want to hunker down and just sort of huddle up and wait for it to blow over.”

Then Trudeau added:

“We can’t do that around climate change … It’s going to take a will of citizens to say ‘yes, it does matter that I fight deforestation in Indonesia, it does matter that we’re battling floods and famine and some of the weather impacts in sub-Saharan Africa or in Asia.’”

Trudeau said because of that, his government “brought in one of the strongest and most broad-based prices on pollution of any advanced economy in the world. It is no longer free to pollute in Canada and we’ve won three elections on it already and we’re going to be facing a fourth where it’s very much in question.”

He added his carbon tax gives eight out of 10 people in the middle class or working to join it more money in rebates than his price on pollution costs them, not mentioning that Canada’s parliamentary budget officer disputes this claim when one factors in the economic damage Trudeau’s carbon tax causes to the economy.

Trudeau also implied he introduced his carbon tax as the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to government regulations and subsidies, when the reality is his plan includes all three at a cost of more than $200 billion.