While the federal government is strategizing about how to cope with a possible victory by Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election, could it explain why it failed to anticipate U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act???
That legislation, passed last year, whose main purpose was in fact to offer hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to clean energy companies in the U.S., has resulted in Canadian taxpayers going into hock — even more than they already were — with regard to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate-change strategy.
For example, if you’re wondering why the federal and Ontario governments just promised up to $30 billion to European automakers Volkswagen and Stellantis to manufacture electric vehicle batteries in Canada instead of the U.S., that’s the direct result of the massive subsidies offered to such companies under the IRA.
It wasn’t part of the Trudeau government’s strategy — which has already imposed a national carbon tax/price on Canadians, while the U.S. has never had one, a policy continued by Biden.
While the federal government is strategizing about how to cope with a possible victory by Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election, could it explain why it failed to anticipate U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act? That legislation, passed last year, whose main purpose was...
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Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland herself said, when releasing her 2023 budget in March, that Canada wouldn’t have earmarked $80 billion in subsidies for such deals —raising the total amount the federal government is spending on climate change to $200 billion — were it not for Biden’s IRA.
In other words, the Trudeau government’s policy — and spending — on climate change, is now being driven by U.S. policy which, in the real world, was inevitable given our shared borders.
The difference is the Americans don’t have a national carbon tax — a tax the Trudeau government repeatedly assured us would make Canada a global leader in attracting green technology investments here, compared to other countries without one.
In a commencement address to graduating students at Boston’s Northwestern University in May, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the fundamental question of our time is: “Does capitalist democracy still work?”
That, of course, raises the question of what she thinks should replace it, if she wonders if it’s still working, since dictatorships — see the collapse of the former Soviet Union — don’t exactly have a great record on capitalism or democracy.
And what does it mean in the context of a Liberal government headed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who, when asked in 2013, when he was Liberal leader, what country he most admired aside from Canada, answered:
“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime and say, ‘We need to go green, we want to start investing in solar’.” (?????)
In a commencement address to graduating students at Boston’s Northeastern University in May, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the fundamental question of our time is: “Does capitalist democracy still work?” That, of course, raises the question of what she thinks should replace it, if...
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On that front, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault will soon be off to China, ostensibly to make the world’s largest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases, the country that burns more coal than the rest of the world combined, an ally in the fight against climate change.
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