Canada’s saviour to the manor born Mark Carney has some plan or another for saving us from the evil climate change monster. It involves carbon offsets, whatever those are, since the marvellous carbon tax he and his Liberal party long defended is apparently suddenly like totally uncool if voters don’t like it. But the problem is, as Jamie Sarkonak wrote in the National Post, Carney thinks that, whatever they are, carbon credits work like magic even if he can’t explain how. Which is not untypical of politicians, who know that when they have thought something up, or their team has spun it, it must be marvellous even if they don’t know if it is a man or a horse. Thus Carney’s main rival Chrystia Freeland “vows to scrap Canada’s consumer carbon pricing regime in favour of alternatives to be developed through wide-ranging consultations.” Ah, the common touch. Marvellous. Except the bit where she’s been on this issue for many years, and in power for a decade, and all she’s really figured out is the one thing she stridently championed is rubbish. And what if the “wide-ranging consultations” report back that the alternatives don’t work either? According to a characteristically credulous reporter “Freeland says her plan will build durable, lasting climate progress without making Canadians pay the cost.” Like magic.
It actually gets worse. Freeland’s plan, or more precisely her jumble of focus-grouped phrases, includes “My plan will build durable, lasting climate progress without making Canadians pay the cost.” So the reporter quoted it verbatim without saying he was doing so, almost as if he worked for the party not the news-consuming public.
Moreover, Freeland says:
“I am so proud to have designed and launched Canada’s $94 billion suite of investment tax credits to scale-up clean power generation, clean tech manufacturing, and EV supply chains. Along with the investment tax credits, I’m proud to have launched the $15 billion Canada Growth Fund, which is helping to decarbonize our economy and create good jobs. Already, the Canada Growth Fund has put over $3 billion to work in 11 Canadian projects.”
Proud of her boondoggles, she is. Notice what’s missing from that list? Right. The dreaded carbon tax, no longer a “price on pollution” but “the consumer-facing carbon tax”. As in:
“My government will replace the consumer-facing carbon tax with alternatives that still reduce emissions but take the cost off workers’ backs. I will work with provinces and territories, labour leaders, experts, industry, Indigenous Peoples, and Canadians to find a solution that works for our federation.”
See? She has no idea what it is, just how it will be sold. Unless you count:
“My government will ensure the biggest polluters pay, and that their means of reducing emissions, like carbon credit markets, function properly. I will improve building codes to accelerate net-zero construction, support investments in renewable power, such as wind and small modular nuclear reactors, at industrial sites, and more. Canada will reach net-zero by 2050 in a way that puts Canadian workers first.”
Make Word Salad Great Again! Including the bit where she will “ensure” that “carbon credit markets function properly”. How? Um uh duh by being the great me not some wretched advocate of carbon taxes that consumers face… like ones that increase the cost of those things essential to making the stuff they actually buy, an obvious obstacle over which Carney too tripped as if he’d never heard of economics.
It really is embarrassing. Freeland also burbles that:
“Canada needs to keep up with growing demand by supercharging our clean electricity production, breaking down electricity distribution barriers, and reducing red tape to get big projects built.”
But “supercharging our clean energy production” isn’t a plan. It’s barely even an aspiration. It’s just buzzwords. And once again we retort that if you could walk that way you’d have done it by now. Hasn’t the Liberal administration of Justin Trudeau been promising, and trying, to “supercharge” our “clean energy production” for a decade, while productivity and business investment slump and per capita income stagnates? Yup. And who was his long-time finance minister and deputy PM? Some Freeland person. Never mind.
On the specific question of those blasted carbon credit markets, “function properly” is the thing they don’t do. As Sarkonak observes:
“they’re vulnerable to fraud, even when third-party auditing is involved. In Alberta, which has supervised its own offset market since 2007, the province leaves verification of offset providers to independent auditors. In 2023, it took one of those independent auditors to court for falsifying paperwork. The person responsible was fined $10,000…. in the U.S., one major offset firm simply faked their emissions-reduction data to sell more supposed credits to corporate buyers, and is now facing prosecution. In 2023, more than 90 per cent of the carbon credits approved by American world-leading carbon offset auditor Verra the Guardian were found to not represent real emissions cuts. A similar problem had emerged in California: due to dubious math, one in three carbon credits were found by ProPublica to represent no real-world reduction in emissions at all.”
So when someone blithely insists that they will somehow make them work just by saying “Arise, and work with me in charge” it’s not unreasonable to ask if they have given any thought to practicalities.
As a friend commented long ago about the less inspired entries in the second wave of James Bond franchise, 007 toward the end would infiltrate the supervillain’s supercomplex “with no other plan than to be James Bond.” And people like Freeland and Carney seem to think it enough to have no other plan than to be themselves without realizing that James Bond always emerged victorious only because he was James Bond and it was fiction. The latter part of which can also be said of Carney’s economic plans more broadly, as vague as they are stale and yet sure to work because he’s Mark Carney and other people aren’t.
Except the bit where he said Canada was the leading supplier of semiconductors to the United States, where he turned out to be Bozo the Clown and it very didn’t work.
Based on polling data since Trudeau's alleged imminent resignation requiring a suspension of Parliament, the Eloi are impressed with the (new) residual faces even if the policies are the same as the old but disguised in newspeak.
Handing Canada to a WEF cognoscenti such as Carney….haven’t we learned our lesson over the last decade, countries need pragmatic rational approaches to the topics of the day, not reactive media presentations.
Didn’t the Enlightenment signify humanity’s awakening from the forced belief in magic and supernatural beings who were wiser and more evolved than the hairy assed masses? The total absence of evidence of any deviation from natural cause and effect or empirical reality demonstrated by the fact that everything in human knowledge is amenable to understanding by common sense. Carney’s need for magic means he is out of touch as Marie Antoinette although more personally responsible for his actions.
When it comes to the coming Carney coronation,I can't help but think of the last line of that old song by The Who "Meet the new boss...Same as the old boss".But the song title is "Won't Get Fooled Again".Will we be fooled again?I am appalled by how easily and quickly the voters,especially undecided voters are swayed by freebies that are either paid for by someone else or ultimately by the taxpayer in general.Or a "new" face in the governing party,which is just someone whose always been there just behind the scenes pulling the strings as it turns out.If Canada elects Carney in the next election we are finished,it's Third World country status for us,imo.
The climate crisis is convenient for political purposes. It allows governments to declare imaginary emergencies to expand executive powers. It allowed the Trudeau government to continue Daddy Pierre's war on Alberta and avenge his humiliation for a failed policy.
It gave Sleepy Joe the excuse he needed to pacify his leftist base by demonizing the petroleum industry.
Today Trump is using a fentanyl crisis as an excuse and Trudeau has switched to the annexation threat. Both are more credible than a climate crisis which has grown ho-hum after 40-plus years of hysterical screeching without any noticeable changes.