In response to the Iran War energy crisis Canada’s federal Liberal Administration, after succeeding in convincing four opposition MPs to cross the floor regardless of beliefs and give them a Parliamentary majority so they could ignore the opposition, promptly took the opposition’s advice and suspended the federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel until Labour Day, when presumably it will again be OK to be bankrupted at the pump or something. Which is odd since, as noted in previous newsletters, they’ve spent the last 11 years trying to raise the price of hydrocarbon energy so people would use less and not set the sky on fire. But also since as Dan McTeague of Canadians for Affordable Energy duly reminded people, if what you really want is affordable energy you should clear away obstacles to producing more of it. Alas, it appears to be asking too much.

Cutting fuel taxes was a popular move, which is often enough for some parties to make it fit their values. But it’s also a sign that even when Canadians tell pollsters they’re concerned about climate change, it doesn’t mean they really are, in the sense of being willing to pay to help stop it.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business responded positively, and also somewhat pointedly with regard to Carney pinching Conservative policy:

“Today’s announcement by the federal government to temporarily suspend excise fuel taxes on gasoline and diesel will provide welcome relief for small businesses already squeezed by high costs. It is good to see both government and the official opposition supporting action on this critical issue…. The next step for the federal government should be to permanently eliminate the tax-on-tax treatment of charging the GST on gasoline and diesel fuel taxes. Provincial governments should also follow suit and pause their fuel excise and sales taxes.”

By contrast, something called “Canadians for Tax Fairness,” whose real program seems to be “Canadians for Communism or Worse” including crushing taxes on anything or anyone useful, howled in a press release oddly not posted to their website that “Mark Carney’s gas tax cut is a multi-billion-dollar gift to price gougers”. And they offer to slice and dice the rich and place their shredded remains on the menu:

“Instead of padding what the Financial Times projects will be a $90 billion windfall for Canadian oil producers with public funds, the federal government should take action to actually fix the problem and address affordability for the long term. A 33% tax on windfall oil and gas profits could raise $18 billion this year. A 75% windfall profits tax (like we had during the Second World War) would raise $46 billion this year. Either would leave oil and gas companies with more revenue than they were expecting before this crisis began.”

Evidently adding $46 billion in new charges to our energy industry on top of the scheduled $170 dollar per tonne industrial carbon tax didn’t appeal even to the federal Liberals. But what are those masters of leveraging catalytic transformations doing? Or rather, what do they think they are doing?

Well, the rationale for this move, typical of this rhetorically opaque outfit, was “I think very clearly Canadians want government to govern”. As opposed to what, you cry? Garden? Fly about trading clichés with other muddled verbose social democrats? But the Prime Minister immediately added “to take on immediate concerns such as today which is what we’re doing on affordability”. Which has been a concern for the entire 13 months he’s been in office without him taking on immediate concerns even though he had said he would be judged at the grocery store (not the gas pump) and food prices continue to rise. But evidently consistency is a hobgoblin of non-Liberal minds.

So the PM, uniquely talented at verbiage involving words like catalyse, transformative and leverage, and running the largest non-COVID deficit in our peacetime history (which was sold as an “investment and austerity budget”), admitted that it would cost the feds $2.4 billion. But, he burbled, it’s a “responsible, temporary measure consistent with what it takes to build a stronger economy with sound fiscal management.” Which is evidently the kind of thing his party’s supporters like to hear as it is full of good words. Words like “responsible” and “sound” and “fiscal management” and “stronger economy.” Even “consistent”. But don’t ask why or how, as it would require specifics.

That he will use such terms about any initiative whatsoever appears not to matter; his party just cemented its new majority by winning three byelections on the strength of its lack of record. They’re rhetorically all “elbows up” about improving productivity, eliminating internal trade barriers and developing energy resources so as to give Donald Trump a stiff one upside the head. But alas, income inequality is at its worst level in two decades. And one reason why is that, as the Financial Post just complained:

“For every dollar that flowed into Canada between 2015 and 2024, two dollars left the country, with the net outflow of $1 trillion being the ‘most significant capital exodus’ in modern Canadian history, according to a new study by the country’s biggest bank.”

As a result we are now last in the G7 in capital investment. And we are not moving at any kind of speed to fix the barriers to investment. Not least because we are complacent to the point of self-parody.

Thus on the question of a temporary partial break on gas taxes Prime Minister Carney also said:

“When Canadians are facing financial pressures, they carefully manage their expenses. They expect their government to do the same.”

Hoo hah! In the first place, his government’s management of expenses is at once frivolous and frightening. In the second, no Canadian who’s been watching government finances over the last two decades could possibly expect their government to do anything other than live far beyond its means.

In the third, it is the declared purpose of this administration, to the extent that its mumblings can be deciphered, to jack up the price of fossil fuels so we all stop using them. It is why his “Memorandum of Understanding” with Alberta made higher industrial carbon taxes a precondition for pretending to approve new pipelines. But as G.K. Chesterton wisely observed:

“Men always mean something, even when their words mean nothing.”

And Mark Carney means to push through the Green Energy Transition through whatever means grease the skids.