Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau said that the Liberals will not abandon their carbon-pricing regime despite procedural protest tactics from the Conservatives that forced MPs to vote non-stop through the night Thursday and into Friday evening.
Conservative Leader
Pierre Poilievre and his team said they turned to procedure to challenge the Liberals on carbon pricing. They have also pledged that they will not relent in their pursuit of getting the Liberals to change their position.
Mr. Trudeau, who was in the House of Commons on Friday morning, said “No, we’re not axing the tax” as he left the chamber with a smile.
Earlier this week, Mr. Poilievre delivered a speech to his caucus in which he said his party would put forward thousands of amendments to force all night, round-the-clock voting until the Liberals agreed to their demand “to take the tax off farmers, First Nations and families.”
In an effort to battle rising prices (like from the carbon taxes for example) and failing Liberal support in Atlantic Canada, the federal government is increasing the rebate on carbon pricing for rural Canadians and lifting the carbon price off of home heating oil entirely for the next three years.
The new rules would apply to the Prairie provinces (like the 0.3% of heating oil users in Saskatchewan), Ontario (where this is also a tiny %’age) and Atlantic Canada (where on average heating oil is used in about 33% of homes) to address affordability concerns, but have been largely criticized by climate groups.
While the temporary pause applies across the country, the new data show how the move clearly favours Atlantic Canada over elsewhere.
nationalpost.com
Mr. Trudeau said he would increase the carbon price rebate for rural Canadians and pilot a new rebate program in Atlantic Canada that will entirely cover the costs for lower-income households to switch to heat pumps.
The government is not making a similar exemption for any other fuels used for heating like they did for heating oil predominantly used in Atlantic Canada, so people who use natural gas to heat their homes will still have to pay the carbon price.
The federal government has since
rejected calls for more carbon-pricing concessions, saying its carveout aimed at improving the affordability of home heating oil won’t be extended to households who use other fuels to heat their homes
like Natural Gas used predominantly across the nation outside of Atlantic Canada.
There has been a significant backlash against the carbon tax in Atlantic Canada. Federal carbon pricing took effect on the East Coast in July. Since then, local MPs have received an earful about the higher costs. Opinion polling shows the Conservatives have gained a double-digit lead over the Liberals in the region.
Ottawa is increasing the rural rebate on carbon pricing and introducing a three-year exemption on home heating oil, in a significant rollback to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s marquee climate policy
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The Trudeau government’s position has been to phase out unabated fossil fuels – meaning the use of oil, natural gas and coal to produce energy where there is no mechanism to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions they produce, such as carbon capture.
Canada adopted that position in the wake of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau causing a firestorm in 2017 when he said his climate change policies would eventually “phase out” Alberta’s oilsands, which went down about as well as you’d expect in Alberta.
In the face of that, the PM later said he “misspoke” and “said something the way I shouldn’t have said it.”
Every major United Nations conference on climate change ends the same way – with absurd political hype over adopting meaningless catch phrases and setting imaginary goals that its 195 member nations will then fail to achieve. This year’s global gabfest in Dubai, located in an uber-wealthy...
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What the Trudeau government has consistently failed to understand is that Canadians are ready to help lower emissions if they have realistic ways to do so that do not impose unfair economic burdens on them, particularly in the tough economic times and affordability crisis they are currently facing.
However, they will, and are, rejecting federal policies that simply increase their cost of living with no demonstrable benefit to the environment.
That’s because with 1.6% of the global total, Canada’s emissions are not enough to materially impact climate change, as the parliamentary budget officer has reported, along with the fact that when the negative impact on the Canadian economy of the federal carbon tax is factored in, most Canadian households paying it end up worse off financially, despite federal rebates
that some Canadians might receive if they’re not single, or not above the poverty line (whatever that is), etc…