Author: Unknown
Published on: 05/02/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
Pierre Poilievre has vowed to repeal a carbon pricing scheme enacted by outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. The policy put an added cost on fossil fuel products such as petrol. He blamed the environmental programme for an affordability crisis in Canada. The Conservatives see this as a winning issue, and so they double and triple down and have turned it into a controversial position. But Mertins-Kirkwood said the political rhetoric around carbon pricing has “dramatically overblown” the issue. The issue is that it’s become this political football, this symbol of government overreach on the one hand and then the epitome of climate policy on the other hand. Canadians feel the effects of carbon pricing every time they fill up their gas tanks, pay their natural gas bill or go to the grocery store. The federal government put a rebates system in place in an effort to help Canadian households offset the carbon price. In a December report, University of Calgary professors Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter found that Canadian households received quarterly payments through the government’s rebate system. Canada is home to one of the world’s largest oil deposits, in the western province of Alberta. Conservative campaign to “axe the tax” belies a more wide-reaching effort by the party to scale back on climate action. Liberals break with policy Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said some Canadian politicians have been “scapegoating carbon pricing” as part of an “effort to limit all climate action” she also told Al Jazeera that the Conservatives have failed to put forward “any climate plan or constructive proposals” so far. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party is set to choose a new leader to replace Trudeau in early March. Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the top contender in Chrystia Freeland — Trudeau’s longtime deputy and a former finance minister — also said she plans to cancel the carbon price for Canadians. “Where people have a consumer-facing price on carbon, they’re saying, ‘You know, we don’t like it,’” she said in a recent interview.
Original: 1520 words
Summary: 362 words
Percent reduction: 76.18%