For Pierre Poilievre and his provincial allies, it’s all carbon tax, all the time. Never mind that his latest attempt at filibustering the April 1 increase in the tax and rebate fell flat, just like all his previous legislative efforts. Now, he’s tabled a motion calling for an “emergency meeting” between Canada’s premiers and the prime minister to address the “ongoing carbon tax crisis and the financial burden it places on Canadians.” Justin Trudeau should eagerly call this bluff.
So far, at least, he’s dismissed the idea on the basis that he already met with provincial leaders back in 2016 on his government’s pan-Canadian climate change plan. But this is a transparently thin gruel given how much has changed in our political universe since 2016 — from the occupants of every premier’s office in the country to the popularity of his signature climate policy. It’s time for Trudeau to serve up something much more substantial: a televised national climate conference.
That’s right: climate, not carbon tax. This wouldn’t just be a political festivus where the premiers could air their various grievances about the carbon tax and its supposed impacts. Instead, it would be a broader examination of the economic and environmental imperatives behind climate policy and the need to find the most effective version of it for Canada’s national interests. As Mark Carney said recently, "Given the events over the past year, we need to re-establish the consensus for this imperative. And so I very much welcome Premier [Danielle] Smith's suggestion of a first ministers meeting on climate. She was a little more narrowly focused, but I think it could be broadened out."
The prime minister should convene this conference over the summer, when MPs aren’t distracted by the federal budget or any other legislative priorities — and when the impacts of climate change are most visible and obvious to Canadians. He should summon a roster of experts, from economics to environmental scientists, to explain precisely how the federal carbon tax works. And he should invite the premiers to make their own submissions about how they would reduce emissions without one.
That would be the price of admission for the provinces, and it would cost far more than they seem to think. Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe, for example, would have to explain his recent comments about how his province had looked at alternatives to the carbon tax and rejected them on the basis they were more expensive. Smith would have to walk back her 2021 comments about the rebate, which she said was more than adequate to cover the cost of the carbon tax for her household. And Doug Ford would have to try explaining how the carbon tax worked, which would be punishment in and of itself.
The Conservative premiers would also have to present some sort of viable alternative that would almost certainly expose their fealty to the fossil fuel industry. That’s because after more than five years of carping about the carbon tax, Canada’s Conservative premiers still haven’t devised a viable alternative that doesn’t somehow involve exporting more oil and gas. Case in point: New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs’ suggestion that exporting LNG from the Maritimes is somehow a viable way to reduce our national emissions. “In Canada, we’re thinking in a bubble,” he said. “I propose to make a difference worldwide.”
This idea has been debunked more times than I care to count, and I’ve done plenty of that work myself. We don’t get credit for emissions reductions that happen elsewhere and if we did, then so would China given the massive volume of electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines it exports around the world. We’d also have to account for the higher carbon intensity of the millions of barrels of oil we export, which would almost certainly zero-out any credit we’d get for exporting LNG. This poorly constructed fig leaf is an unserious argument being made by unserious people, and it should be exposed as such for the public’s consumption.
Yes, this would involve a lot of work and hassle for the prime minister and his staff, and at a time of the year where they’d rather be with their families and friends than sparring with Poilievre and Smith. But if they want to actually defend the policy that now defines them, they have to start firing some rounds instead of just fielding them. A televised national conference would force the premiers to show their weak hands, give the Liberals an opportunity to call out their lies and half-truths about the carbon tax and its supposed costs, and help reframe the conversation around climate change and the economic risks and opportunities it creates.
It would also advance the Trudeau team’s emerging (and, frankly, overdue) narrative about how it’s actually the premiers who are actively undermining the country’s prosperity and stability to advance their own political interests with Poilievre determined to serve as their head waiter. If that’s not a fight Trudeau is interested in, maybe it’s time for him to step aside for someone who will take it on.
We need a real conversation about safe supply
As someone who grew up in a progressive Vancouver family, I have a certain set of biases when it comes to the conversation about how best to tackle the epidemic of drug addiction in our country. I believe in the merits of safe supply, for example, but I also know how stubborn the problem can be — and how some organizations and institutions sometimes confuse what’s best for their clients with what’s best for them.
I have no easy answers when it comes to the current debate between those who advocate for a recovery-first approach and those who think addressing the toxicity of street drugs is the top priority. I happen to think anyone who suggests there is a single overarching solution here is immediately worthy of suspicion, since this strikes me as an issue that defies any sort of ideological orthodoxy. Instead, we should examine all possible approaches and solutions, and hope against hope we find one that actually starts to turn things around.
Unfortunately, we have politicians like Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith who seem determined to turn this into a partisan wedge — and a political cudgel. Witness their recent comments about an RCMP seizure in Prince George, one they both suggested showed that drugs from a safe supply program were being diverted and sold on the street in large volumes. There’s clearly some level of diversion happening due to safe supply programs, but this sort of overreaction is a tell. “Basing your statements on one single news report without waiting for all the information is not the … right way to go about things,” B.C. Solicitor General Mike Farnworth said.
The Alberta government has been particularly shameless about advertising the virtue of its new recovery-based approach. As Mental Health and Addiction Minister Dan Williams told the CBC’s Ian Hanomansing, “We have a choice in front of us. Is it that handing drugs out to drug addicts and the model of harm reduction that it has become is the path forward? Or is it going to be investing heavily in recovery, so we don’t see any more of those scenes on the street you saw yesterday.”
Said investment includes the creation of two new organizations, one of which is a Crown corporation, being carved out of the provincial health system’s existing structures and resources. In essence, they’re conducting a major experiment here, and they’re using the resources and lives of Albertans to do it. "They're all in on the recovery,” said Steven Lewis, an adjunct professor of health policy at Simon Fraser University and Vancouver-based consultant, in an interview with the CBC. “Clearly, they have no interest and no faith in other approaches that might be effective in some circumstances, such as safe supply," Lewis said.
The risks here are obvious. But so too, in fairness, is the potential reward. "If they live up to this, and if they do create a centre of excellence that is science-based and pays attention to the international evidence, I think it could be, at the very least, a contribution to knowledge,” Lewis said. But therein lies the rub: is an ideologically driven experiment really going to be science- and evidence-based, especially when it’s coming from a government that has already shown its disdain for both when it comes to other hot-button public health issues like vaccines? I wouldn’t want to bet on it, much less with the life of someone I love.
We must remove the politics from this, if that’s even possible at this point, and return the conversation to one where experts and their research carry the weight. Neither side, at this point, seems to have any compelling evidence in their favour. Drug-related deaths continue to rise in British Columbia, just as they do in Alberta. Neither “model” is really working, and both ought to include and incorporate the best practices of the other.
If we stop learning and turn this into a political litmus test, one where people retreat behind their pre-existing biases and beliefs, we’ll be doing the victims of drug addiction a monumental disservice. Instead, we have to do a better job of listening to what works — and understanding that we’re all in this one together. I am not particularly optimistic about this happening any time soon.
With friends like these…
If a man is known by the company he keeps, then should a politician be known by the people who endorse him? That’s a question Pierre Poilievre’s supporters are trying to knock down right now, given the recent praise he received from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “Been following this guy for years and he is the real deal!” Jones posted on Twitter on April 4. “Canada desperately needs a lot more leaders like him and so does the rest of the world.”
This isn’t the first time Jones has sung Poilievre’s praises. Back in 2022, he included Poilievre on a short list of leaders alongside Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Italy’s Georgia Meloni who were, as he put it, “totally anti-New World Order.” This was back when Poilievre was flirting most heavily with popular conservative conspiracy theories around things like the World Economic Forum, and when he was most explicitly courting the sorts of far-right voters who listen to people like Jones.
You might think, given Jones’s horrifying record — one that includes describing the Sandy Hook school shooting as a “hoax” and calling 9/11 an “inside job” — that Poilievre and his team might try to distance himself from the bankrupt conspiracy theorist and his seal of approval. Instead, his office produced a statement containing some of the weakest tea this side of England. “We do not follow the individual you mention or listen to what he says,” it read.
Michael Taube, a Postmedia columnist and former speechwriter for Stephen Harper, did his best to run some interference here. “Poilievre also can’t control what people say about him — and who ultimately chooses to endorse him,” he wrote. “There are certain things that are completely out of the hands of elected officials. In particular, any and all endorsements, positive remarks and kind words from either side of the political spectrum — and any part of the world.”
This is, first and foremost, utter nonsense. No, people like Poilievre can’t control what people say about him or who says it, but they absolutely can control how they respond to it. He has no problem calling out any number of people, from political rivals like the prime minister and his environment minister to municipal leaders across the country and even former Bank of Canada governors like Mark Carney. But for some reason, he can’t even say Jones’s name, much less reject his endorsement. I wonder why that might be.
Ah, but what about that time a Hamas spokesperson endorsed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Taube asks? This is a pitifully obvious attempt at whataboutism, one that pretends Hamas’s reaction to a multi-country push for a ceasefire is somehow the same as them directly endorsing an individual leader. The Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein tried the same trick on Twitter, suggesting, “Sane people will take Alex Jones endorsing Pierre Poilievre as seriously as they did Hamas endorsing Justin Trudeau.” The fact that Goldstein himself tweeted about Hamas’s statement and how it apparently reflected on the prime minister raises some interesting questions here.
In the end, though, Poilievre’s silence here says it all. He knows he can’t call Jones out or reject his endorsement without risking blowback from Jones’s conspiracy-addled followers, many of whom just happen to also be Poilievre supporters. He saw what some of them did to his former cabinet colleague Jason Kenney when he was premier of Alberta, and he understands that Maxime Bernier and the PPC are still lurking out there waiting to reclaim the voters Poilievre lured away. Rarely have so few words said so much.
Elon Musk and the EV innovator’s dilemma
One of my favourite hypocrisies on the fossil-fuelled right is the widely shared belief that oil and gas companies can and will innovate in ways that meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions but their clean energy competitors will never make similar advances. Instead, the opposite is almost certainly going to be the case — incumbent oil and gas companies will slow-roll their investments in innovation while renewable energy technologies continue to break cost and scale barriers.
Two examples will suffice here. First, there’s the Pathways Alliance of oilsands companies, which continues to rag the puck as hard as it possibly can on the carbon capture and storage projects it claims to want to build. It seems abundantly clear that they’re now waiting for a Poilievre government to either release them from their environmental responsibilities or more deliberately and aggressively subsidize the technologies that would help meet them.
On the other side of the ledger, Chinese battery maker CATL isn’t waiting around to invest in its future. In partnership with Yutong, one of China’s largest busmakers, it announced a new battery with a 1.5-million kilometre warranty that apparently has zero degradation through the 1,000 charging cycles. More importantly, perhaps, it announced earlier this year that it would reduce the per-kilowatt hour cost of its lithium-ion phosphate battery cells by 50 per cent by the middle of 2024 — batteries that can go 400 kilometres on a 10-minute charge.
This breathtaking pace of technological development stands in stark contrast to the plodding efforts of Canada’s oil and gas industry, which seems determined to move as slowly as possible. In an interesting twist, one well-covered in this New York Times podcast, it’s the direct result of Elon Musk deciding to build a Tesla factory in China. The decision to relocate production facilities from California to China may have saved his car company back in 2018 and 2019. In time, it may well destroy it.
While China and its industrial automotive sector helped Musk build Teslas for less than it cost in America, it also used that experience to help its own carmakers raise their game. Now, companies like BYD and CATL are major global players, and they’re poised to dominate the market and drive costs down to a level where only they can really thrive. That’s good news for consumers, and especially ones who want access to lower-cost EVs like BYD’s Seagull. But it might be bad news for Musk and the legacy automakers he was trying to disrupt before he got disrupted himself.
Required Reading
There were a lot of different pieces that caught my eye this past week, so I’ll try to recap each with a bit of a context.
First, there’s this ruling out of Europe that may set the stage for more climate-related lawsuits across the western world. As Reuters reported, “The Swiss women, known as KlimaSeniorinnen and aged over 64, said their government's climate inaction put them at risk of dying during heat waves. They argued their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to such climate change impacts.” The European Court of Human Rights agreed.
In the process, it may have shown other climate litigants how to pursue their own legal actions against governments. As the Reuters story notes, courts in Australia, Brazil, Peru and South Korea are considering similar climate-oriented cases, while India’s top court ruled its citizens have a right to be free from the adverse impacts of climate change. Will Canada be next?
Next, there’s this piece from Bloomberg about the difficulties that anyone who owns a hydrogen vehicle in California is facing right now. It should be of particular interest to Danielle Smith and her energy minister, given their decision to bet on hydrogen cars in Alberta rather than simply embracing electric vehicles.
“It’s clear what technology has won in the marketplace,” says David Reichmuth, a senior engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ clean transportation program. “If we want to go as fast as possible to decarbonize, then the plug-in electric vehicle is clearly the technology with the infrastructure available to do that now.”
That probably explains Alberta’s embrace of hydrogen vehicles. They know it’s not the fastest way to decarbonize the provincial economy, and they know the combination of technological challenges and prohibitively high operating costs will discourage most people from even considering them.
It’s an inversion of Hanlon’s Razor, which stipulates that you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe we can call it Smith’s Razor: never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by a desire to slow-roll the energy transition.
And finally, here’s a piece by the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt on Mark Carney and his ongoing effort to offer Liberals some semblance of a post-Trudeau option. I’m not sure if Canadians would buy what Carney is implicitly selling here, given his credentials and the anti-expert moment we seem to find ourselves mired in. But maybe some actual expertise in politics is exactly what we need right now. If nothing else, I’d like to see him — and us — find out.