GOLDSTEIN: Stop believing anything Liberals say about carbon taxes

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Trusting the Liberals on carbon taxes is like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy is going to hold the football for him.

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How many times are Canadians going to fall for the same gag worthy of a comic strip but not of the government of Canada?

Consider their record:

Liberal leader and prime-minister designate Mark Carney, having been the world’s leading corporate lobbyist for global carbon taxes for years, now says he’s scrapping outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “consumer carbon tax.”

But what he’s doing is folding it into Trudeau’s industrial carbon tax and adding a second carbon tax — a tariff that Canadians will pay on many imported goods — misleadingly described as a “border adjustment mechanism.”

But that’s just one example of how the Liberals have misled Canadians not only about carbon taxes but about what they have accomplished.

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Here are others:

Trudeau said he favoured a carbon tax to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions because it’s more efficient and effective than government subsidies and regulations.

What he failed to mention is that his climate change plan includes government subsidies and regulations in addition to the carbon tax, earmarking more than $200 billion of federal taxpayers’ money to pay for them.

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Before the 2019 federal election, then-environment minister Catherine McKenna said Trudeau’s carbon tax would not go above $50 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions once it reached that level in 2022.

After the election, Trudeau announced his carbon tax would increase annually every year after 2022, until it reached $170 per tonne in 2030, dramatically raising the cost of almost all goods and services because almost all of them are created using fossil fuel energy.

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For years, the Trudeau Liberals misleadingly cited only the finding of independent, non-partisan parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux that most families receive more in rebates than they pay in climate taxes when considering only its fiscal impact.

But they ignored and later tried to discredit his additional finding that when factoring in the damage the carbon tax does to the Canadian economy, most families pay more in carbon taxes than they receive in rebates.

For years the Trudeau Liberals have insisted their carbon tax is “revenue neutral,” meaning all the money raised was returned to Canadians when in fact it was not revenue neutral, because the federal government did not rebate the GST Canadians pay on top of the carbon tax.

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In 2021, then-environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson told the Globe and Mail that 2019 would be the last year of rising industrial greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

In fact, following a decrease in emissions in 2020 because of the global recession caused by the COVID pandemic, Canada’s emissions began going up again in 2021 and 2022, the latest year of available government data.

In fact, the Liberals have never met an emissions reduction target they set for themselves, going back to 1993, so there’s no reason to believe they will hit their 2030 target.

For years the Trudeau Liberals defended their carbon tax by citing almost every example of severe weather in Canada as caused by human-induced climate change, while failing to mention that, even if Canada was able to achieve net zero emissions by tomorrow, it would have no impact on climate change because, as the parliamentary budget officer has reported, Canada’s emissions at 1.5% of the global total are too small to materially impact climate change.

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