Jonathan Swift may not have thought much about things like climate change or carbon emissions, but the 17th century Irish satirist definitely would have understood how the debate around them would unfold. As he wrote back in 1710, “falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” About this, at least, he wasn’t joking.
Three hundred years later, the truth is still no match for an honestly told lie. In some respects, it’s even less suited for the task than ever. Witness the disconnect between what we know about the carbon tax in Canada and the way it’s perceived by large swathes of the public. As a new paper from University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter shows, Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices. As Tombe noted in a long thread on social media, “that’s a tiny fraction of the 26 per cent rise in food prices in Canada over the past five years.”
This is important and useful academic research. It also comes limping along about three years too late to really matter in the grander scheme of things. Canadians are increasingly opposed to the carbon tax, and increasingly willing to blame it for the increase in food prices that has rocked households and economies across the developed world.
That’s largely a function of the Conservative Party of Canada’s aggressive campaign to paint the carbon tax as the source of all of Canada’s problems — and, by extension, their victory in the next election as the natural solution to them. There is no carbon tax correlation too spurious for the Conservatives to draw here, whether it’s rising food bank usage or declining per-capita economic prosperity.
In pursuit of this particular jest they’ve leaned heavily on the words and work of Sylvain Charlebois, the self-anointed “Food Professor” on Twitter. Charlebois isn’t prepared to go along with some of their more exaggerated claims, but he has been openly hostile towards academic peers like Tombe and Winter who have sought to quantify the carbon tax’s actual impact on food prices. His response to their new paper, for example, was to declare it “a clear example of carbon tax propaganda” and note that “Trevor Tombe is doing quite well with the Trudeau regime.”
Personal attacks notwithstanding, Charlebois’s own research on the subject doesn’t actually seem to disprove their findings. As his own recent paper on the carbon tax’s impact says, “food price inflation is a worldwide phenomenon that has several, diverse causes. Therefore, attributing food price hikes to a single exogenous source without accounting for other factors may only provide a limited understanding of the issue.” In other words, blaming the carbon tax for food price hikes — as Conservative partisans do each and every day — would be a mistake.
The same would seem to apply to the ongoing campaign to exaggerate its broader economic impact. After all, Charlebois’s most recent paper concludes with the observation that “without historical data at the firm level, we cannot provide evidence of the impact of carbon taxes on firm-level competitiveness and economic growth.” So much for the job-killing carbon tax that Conservatives love to talk about.
The problem here — well, one of them — is that this nuanced observation is only available if you read the paper itself, not the framing of its contents and conclusions on social media. There, and especially on Twitter/X, it’s being presented by partisans as a slam dunk against the carbon tax and its supposedly massive impact on the cost of living. It’s yet another example of the different velocities at which economic facts and political fiction are able to travel, a gap that’s only gotten wider with the advent of speed-enhancing technologies like social media.
I don’t have an obvious or easy solution here — not, at least, one that’s politically feasible. There’s no universe where social media can be put back in its Pandora’s box, even if it would be better for almost all of us if it could. Any attempt to more effectively regulate the transmission of information on social media, much less actively contain the spread of falsehoods, would be inevitably characterized as an intolerable and undemocratic affront to free expression and liberty.
But the apparently inevitable demise of the carbon tax in Canada is still an important reminder of how you can win a battle of the facts and still lose the war of competing truths. In politics, as Swift would have told us, it’s the tale that really matters in the end. The next time progressives get the chance to design another ambitious piece of policy, they’d probably do well to remember that.
Canada’s Conservatives just can’t wait to surrender to Donald Trump
One of Donald Trump’s oddest political gifts is his almost innate ability to detect and expose weakness in others. He’s used that to devastating effect on any number of political foes in his own country, from former opponents like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to his own vice-president, JD Vance. Now, with his threat to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian exports on his first day back in office, he’s exposing the weakness of Conservatives north of the border as well.
The last time Trump came for Canada, savvy countermeasures targeted the constituencies of key allies, like a tariff on bourbon that struck at Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky. But this time, rather than aligning behind a “Team Canada” strategy to deal with the threat, Canada’s Conservative premiers and politicians have rushed to the nearest media platform to pledge their fealty to Trump. And if they have to sacrifice the country’s best interests in order to protect the oil and gas industry and harm their political opponents? Well, just watch them.
Trump’s tariff threat was premised on the idea that “drugs, in particular fentanyl,” and “illegal aliens” are entering the U.S. via Canada. Rather than pushing back, the Conservatives piled on. Alberta premier Danielle Smith opened the bidding last night with a social media post declaring that the Trump administration “has valid concerns related to illegal activities at our shared border.” True to form, she blamed the Trudeau government for everything, suggesting that it needed to “work with the incoming administration to resolve these issues immediately.”
Former CPC leader Erin O’Toole raised the ante in his own social media offering by suggesting that “first, we should offer to help finance the Keystone XL pipeline.” Ontario premier Doug Ford offered his own take on obsequiousness by placing an American flag in the background of his presser on the tariffs. As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne asked rhetorically, “Why not put a white flag up while you’re at it?”
Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, decided this was yet another opportunity to advance his pre-existing policy priorities and blame the federal government for everything bad happening in the country. Our economy, he said, “is teetering on the brink of collapse,” and we need to come to terms with our “unprecedented weakness.” As far as negotiating strategies go, this is a new one.
But Poilievre isn’t actually interested in negotiating successfully with the Trump administration right now. He’s far more invested in weaponizing the negotiations against his Liberal opponents. “Justin Trudeau must put partisanship aside,” he said in a hilarious moment of unintentional irony, “not just for Team Canada, but for the sake of our people, and fully reverse his liberalization of drugs. Ban them, prosecute those who traffic against them, secure our borders against the illegal importation of fentanyl ingredients.”
Never mind, for the moment, that his statement acknowledges that said ingredients are, in fact, illegal, or that the Trudeau government hasn’t decriminalized fentanyl. Reversing the so-called liberalization of drugs — which, presumably, also includes its legalization of marijuana — would do exactly nothing about the volumes of fentanyl being moved across the US border. And, of course, the Trump administration just nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the role of Health and Human Services secretary, someone who just happens to be a big proponent of liberalizing the treatment of marijuana and psychedelics.
But this was far from the only bias Poilievre wanted to re-confirm. When pressed about the need for a united front on this issue, he decided it would be better to talk about the importance of the oil and gas sector. “What we actually need to do is stand up for our economy by axing taxes, unleashing free enterprise, and having a massive boom in our energy and resource production.”
If anything, this is a plan to piss off the Trump administration — and Trump in particular. He has been clear about his interest in increasing American oil and gas production in pursuit of both energy independence and “energy dominance”. A massive boom in Canada’s oil and gas output would directly threaten both of those things, along with harming the American oil and gas industry that donated so heavily to Trump’s campaign. It’s almost like he hasn’t thought this position through fully.
Then again, that’s the essence of Poilievre’s approach to politics: shoot first, aim second. His decision to opt for noisy point-scoring over quiet diplomacy is yet another reminder for the Liberal government that this round of negotiations with the Trump administration won’t be the same as the first. They cannot, and should not, expect the sort of cross-partisan unity that defined their attempts to save NAFTA from the Trump team’s paranoid mercantilism.
“I only care about Canada,” Poilievre said during his scrum. “I want to put Canada first.” If only that were true of both him and his fellow Conservatives. Instead, it seems like they’ve decided it’s every man and woman for themselves, especially if it means they can advance their pre-existing agendas around energy and climate change. If there’s one silver lining here it’s in Trump’s ability to serve as a mirror of others, one that exposes the depth and content of their character. We’d do well to take a hard look at what it’s saying about the people who want to lead us.
China’s case for climate action keeps getting stronger
COP29 never really stood a chance. Donald Trump’s election earlier this month turned the latest global gathering of climate advocates and political leaders in Baku into a long-distance afterthought. With America’s inevitable backsliding on climate policy, all the promises in the world weren’t going to matter much.
Sure enough, the $300 billion pledged by Canada and other developed countries is a predictable drop in the bucket. There was no commitment to the phaseout of fossil fuels, and any prospect of increased climate ambition in Canada has to be weighed against both the Trump administration’s priorities and the overwhelming likelihood of a victory by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in the next election.
But it’s not all bad news. China has clearly emerged as the global leader in renewable energy technology and exports, and the imminent retreat of America from these markets will only encourage Chinese companies to press their advantage even further. As UCLA professor and China expert Alex Wang told NPR, “they’ve set up a situation where it's good for them to sell clean energy technologies to the world. It's very good economically, and it's good reputationally, and it's good environmentally."
China’s emissions may peak as soon as next year, and those who study its clean energy economy think its government will announce a 2035 target that reduces emissions by 25 to 30 per cent from current levels. It will also continue to leverage its expertise in wind, solar, electric vehicles and batteries to increase its economic and diplomatic influence in the rapidly growing developing world. In the process, it’s creating a kind of clean energy sphere of influence — one the United States won’t be able to match.
That’s because it will help many developing countries wean themselves off increasingly ruinous fossil fuel imports. Take Pakistan, which has seen a massive surge in solar installation as businesses and households look to lower their costs and reduce their dependence on an expensive and rickety national grid. “Fuel imports are one of the largest expenses for even prosperous countries,” Heatmap’s Ryan Cooper wrote in October. “For places like Pakistan, they are a punishing economic drain. Paying for vast amounts of imported coal, gas, and oil in scarce foreign currency is hard enough in good times, but it’s disastrous when one’s currency has depreciated by about 40% over two years.”
The flood of ever-cheaper clean technologies coming out of China will offer countries like Pakistan a way out of this trap. “Panels are now so cheap, even Pakistan can afford to import them by the millions — an expense, yes, but a one-time one. And while solar is inherently intermittent, and therefore not a solution to Pakistan’s reliability problems, batteries are also plummeting in price — down about 90% between 2010 and 2023 — and can help balance out supply. Cheaper batteries also mean cheaper EVs, with (as usual) Chinese models coming out at bewilderingly low prices.”
In other words: it’s the economics, stupid. The Trump administration will do its best to prop up fossil fuel demand in America, and it may even meet with some limited success. But that won’t have any bearing on the rest of the world, and especially the parts where future demand growth for fossil fuels is supposed to come from. If anything, America’s renewed economic war against China will accelerate the speed at which demand-destroying renewable technologies are sold across the global south, as China looks to develop and deepen new markets.
In a way, then, the Trump administration may end up helping global climate action more than it harms it. If that comes to pass, we’ll look back at this failed climate summit as the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.
Crickets, anyone?
Finally, our own Marc Fawcett-Akinson has a fascinating piece on the conservative fixation on crickets, and the weird (and entirely inaccurate) notion that Liberals want to make Canadians eat them. The latest outbreak of this silliness came as a result of the decision by Aspire Food Group, Canada’s largest edible cricket factory (which makes pet food), to lay off two-thirds of its workforce. It received an $8.5 million loan from Ottawa in 2022, one it’s required to repay.
But the very fact of that loan sent the fever swamps into overdrive. “The government's support for Aspire's cricket farm boosted the conspiracy further,” Fawcett-Atkinson writes, “with proponents claiming that the government also wanted to force people to eat the insects. This is false — yet far-right news outlets like The Counter Signal, Rebel News, and True North have written dozens of articles on the subject over the past several years.”
Relax, folks. Nobody is going to take your brisket or pork chops away and force you to eat crickets or the protein that comes from them. And if someone tells you otherwise? Well, they’re clearly farming a different kind of crop: rage.
That’s all for this week. As always, please write with your questions or concerns — and please, follow me (and the rest of the CNO team) on Bluesky.