Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said the Carney government is not serious about climate change. May, who supported Carney’s budget in December, has since questioned the prime minister’s word after accusing him of a climate policy flip-flop.
“If we’re serious about emissions reduction, then we have to actually revisit some of the measures that have been eliminated since (Carney) took over,” May told The Canadian Press.
“They’re miles from hitting any of the Paris Agreement targets, and the prime minister did recommit to me on the floor of the House on Nov. 17 that this government is committed to the Paris Agreement and achieving its targets. So the emissions reduction update, the so-called climate competitiveness strategy — there’s lots of highfalutin titles for what boils down to…(no) climate plan.”"
The carbon tax was never going to work. Making ordinary Canadians pay a tax to subsidize big oilsands producers was an own-goal of epic proportions by the Trudeau government. It didn’t matter at all that lower income families got a refund of that money later on. It’s a failure to understand basic human psychology: people will always prefer money NOW over a bit more money later, see Hyperbolic discounting.
That a carbon tax would work is pretty clear according to both conventional economics and common sense. It needed to be much higher to be effective enough to clearly demonstrate that. Persuading people to accept that is the kind of “leadership” I had in mind.
Not to mention most of the cost to the average consumer had been refunded via rebates and gst. It was only ever supposed to change the cost perception of carbon intensive products.