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Justin Trudeau’s economic policies are now widely disliked and rejected. The Canadian public and business experts alike see them as a cause of inflation and the flight of business investment from Canada.
Hold my beer, says Mark Carney.
Carney, the front-runner to replace Trudeau and become Canada’s next prime minister, has spent the first weeks of his campaign describing an economic plan that sounds like everything Trudeau did, only on steroids.
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Carbon taxes? Yes, as much as ever.
Government subsides to private companies? More than ever, so long as they’re favoured “clean energy” companies, like battery plants in Ontario and Quebec where the Liberals are spending tens of billions.
The federal government pushing ahead with economic policy no matter what? Yes, even if the plans stomp all over free enterprise, not to mention provincial rights and sovereignty.
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Carney promises to use extraordinary powers to get his way. As he put it in a Kelowna speech this week, “My government is going use all of the powers of the federal government, including the emergency powers of the federal government, to accelerate the major projects that we need in order to build this economy.”
And what kind of projects does he think we need? “We will speed up approvals of clean energy projects,” he said in a recent Halifax speech.
Carney, who has been called the architect of pushing green investment policy, still thinks carbon taxes are good, but admits the consumer carbon tax is “very divisive.” He’ll change it, he said, shifting the burden on to Canada’s already struggling industrial sector.
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“The issue wasn’t — to coin a phrase — whether to ‘axe the tax.’ The issue was how to change it,” he said in a Kelowna speech this week.
Under Carney, citizens will still get carbon rebate cheques and big business will pay for it: “We’re making the large companies pay for everybody,” Carney said. “The taxpayer is not going to pay. Our companies, our largest companies, are going to pay.”
Essentially our industrial sector — huge employers, huge creators of export wealth and government taxes — now face the possible double whammy of Carney carbon taxes and Trump tariffs. Of course, they can avoid both if they move their factories to the United States, which is exactly what many will do.
Calgary financier Martin Pelletier has outlined the following scenario: “Carney wins. Goes all-in on securing a formalized deal with the EU (European Union) and mirrors their disastrous regulatory and environmental policies. Aggressively goes after oil and gas sector, imposing a large production cap and phaseout policy. Raises income tax tier and goes after small and medium businesses. Canadian dollar goes to 60 cents. I’m telling you. There will be a mass exodus of wealthy Canadians.”
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In true bizarro Trudeau fashion, Carney has insisted there will be no losers his Carbon Tax 2.0, not consumers, not even big business. When CTV host Todd Battis asked him if the carbon tax on big business would trickle down to consumers, Carney said, “No, because what the big companies are producing by and large are not products that we are consuming. There is some element of that. But, by and large, you know, a steel company, how much steel are you using these days, Todd?”
It’s hard to know what to make of such a nonsensical response other than it’s similar to the magical thinking that we saw regularly from Trudeau, where the federal budget was to miraculously balance itself, as opposed to doubling in size to $1.2 trillion during his 10 years in power.
But whatever Trudeau, Carney and a handful of green-obsessed governments in Europe believe, the rest of the world is pushing ever harder to gobble up and utilize as much energy as possible, including the unprecedented burning of coal, so it can to build up industry and prosperity.
In coming months, you’ll hear Carney repeatedly demonize the USA as some kind of weird outlier caught up in a “fever” that sees them reject his views on emissions reduction. But Americans are simply sick of losing jobs to China, India and other nations. As the ambitious developing world sees it, there’s one surefire way of building an economy — using cheap and abundant energy to drive down prices and make farming and manufacturing economical.
For all his smarts and boasts of pragmatism, Carney refuses to embrace this path. Instead he plans to outpace Trudeau.
Canada is already a weakling among nations, pushed around by China and the USA. It’s hard to imagine us still standing if we accelerate Trudeau’s plans, but that’s the national dream Carney intends to force-feed us.
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