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Jagmeet Singh and Pierre Poilievre are dancing to the same tune

Jagmeet Singh is apparently ready to walk away from the federal government's carbon tax and rebate. It's just the latest example of why he's more like Pierre Poilievre than Justin Trudeau. Photo courtesy of Jagmeet Singh via X

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When Jagmeet Singh was selected by NDP members to replace Thomas Mulcair in 2017, it looked like they had found their answer to Justin Trudeau. As the Canadian Press’s Kristy Kirkup wrote at the time, “He’s young, hip and brimming with charisma, a likable rookie with an eye for style and a robust following on social media who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister. Sound familiar?”

Instead, they may have unwittingly elected a Pierre Poilievre impersonator. From his fondness for online name calling to his studied indifference to things like causality and jurisdiction, Singh has behaved far more like the Conservative Party of Canada’s leader than the prime minister. His apparent intention to abandon support for the federal government’s carbon tax and rebate, one he justified on the exact same basis that Poilievre has been attacking it for over a year, is the most glaring example yet. “We want to see an approach to fighting the climate crisis where it doesn’t put the burden on the backs of working people,” Singh told the Globe and Mail. Sound familiar? 

This is a betrayal of his own party and membership on a bunch of different fronts. The federal carbon tax and rebate — one Singh and his party have backed enthusiastically for nearly five years — was based heavily on the tax introduced by Alberta’s NDP government in 2015. 

But it’s not just the Alberta wing of his party Singh is betraying. The BC NDP is in the midst of a very tight provincial election campaign in which the province’s carbon tax is a major bone of contention. The BC Conservatives have promised over and over again to eliminate it, while the governing BC NDP has stood behind it. Singh’s retreat here will almost certainly make that position more difficult to defend than it already was — and may even cost the party the election. Indeed, the BC Conservative Party released a statement on Thursday “thanking” Singh for his comments. 

Worst of all, perhaps, is his willingness to endorse Poilievre’s deliberately dishonest framing of the carbon tax and its supposed impact on working people. Let’s be clear: all of the arguments Poilievre and his proxies have made about the carbon tax’s supposedly inflationary effects on grocery prices, housing, and the cost of living have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. As Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem noted last September, the carbon tax adds a grand total of 0.15 per cent to inflation. Case in point: while the carbon tax has increased by an additional $30 per tonne since inflation peaked at 8.1 per cent in June 2022, inflation itself has come all the way down to 2.5 per cent as of this July. You’d be pretty hard pressed to draw a correlation there. 

And yet, that’s what Poilievre keeps doing — and what Singh has implicitly endorsed with his comments. Singh also traded in the demonstrably false idea that the carbon tax disproportionately hurts lower-income people, even though the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s analysis has repeatedly shown they get more back in rebates than they pay. Even when you include the PBO’s modeled economic impacts — that, controversially, don’t assign any cost to inaction on climate change — the lowest earning 40 per cent of Canadians net out ahead.

Eliminating the tax and rebate would therefore take money out of the pockets of low-income Canadians. The biggest beneficiaries, meanwhile, would be the richest Canadians, with wealthy Albertans being the biggest winners of all. Those are supposed to be the voters the CPC caters to, not the NDP. Perhaps Singh’s own status as a relatively wealthy person is interfering with his ability to see the politics here clearly. 

All of this might — might — be excusable if Singh had a ready-made alternative to propose. Alas, to borrow Donald Trump’s widely mocked words from this week’s presidential debate, he only has the concepts of a plan at this point. “We’ve been working on a plan,” he said Thursday, “and we’ll be releasing our plan, our vision, for how we can do that in a stronger way in the coming months.”

Said plan will apparently focus on making “big polluters” pay their “fair share”. That might be difficult given the heavy lifting the current carbon tax regime is already doing on that front. Recent analysis by the Canadian Climate Institute shows industrial carbon pricing — that is, the portion of the tax paid by “big polluters” — will be responsible for between 23 and 39 per cent of projected emissions reductions by 2030. The consumer carbon tax, in contrast, is expected to generate less than 10 per cent. 

And, of course, the federal government is still proceeding with its emissions cap for oil and gas companies and clean electricity regulations. How Singh intends to deliver even more reductions here remains to be seen — as do the political ramifications of a more concerted crackdown on large industry and business. 

Jagmeet Singh's willingness to use Pierre Poilievre's arguments against the carbon tax and rebate are a betrayal of his party's principles and priorities -- and a potential opportunity for Justin Trudeau's Liberals.

For the beleaguered Trudeau Liberals, this counts as a rare piece of good news. They can paint themselves as the sole defenders of the carbon tax and rebate regime, one they’re wedded to until political death do they part. They can go after Singh and the NDP for their refusal to stand firm on an issue that’s especially important to their voters. And they can point out that for a guy who was billed as the next coming of Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh has turned out to be little more than a Pierre Poilievre clone. 

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