The triumph of misinformation

OTTAWA—Canada is broken, all right. By last weekend, there were seven premiers urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to either postpone or cancel a planned increase in the carbon levy brought in by the Liberals to enable Canada to try to do its part to address global warming. And one of the seven, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, was refusing to remit the carbon tax his province collects on natural gas in outright defiance of the law as passed by Parliament. This fight has been going on for years. Conservative governments in Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan went to court to challenge the federal government’s right to introduce the carbon tax—eventually losing at the Supreme Court. But today’s post-COVID turmoil has opened the way for a powerful backlash against governments, especially that of Trudeau, in what has evolved into a wave of opposition focused on the carbon tax. Joining this campaign against a federal tax is a potentially winning political hand that Canada’s mostly conservative premiers would, of course, not pass up. And it seems to work. Based, to a large extent, on this single campaign against the carbon levy, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has a clear shot at a victory for his party in the next election. What is astounding about all this is that the entire right-wing offensive is based on misinformation. It is well-established by economists and the federal government that the revenue-neutral carbon tax leaves more money in the pockets of most Canadians. In fact, the tax and its rebate system are designed so that eight in 10 people get back more money from the rebate than they pay out in extra fuel taxes. Not being stupid, Poilievre must be well aware of how the tax works. But he and other Conservatives completely ignore the facts. “If they don't start putting money back in people's pockets instead of filling their pockets, guess what? They're going to get annihilated,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said recently in a typical misrepresentation. In this fashion, Poilievre, Ford, and others have managed to convince Canadians that Ottawa’s carbon-pricing plan, contrary to the truth, is punishing average people—people who would actually be worse off if a Poilievre government were to kill the tax. British Columbia Premier David Eby didn’t leave much doubt about his view of Poilievre’s campaign last week after receiving a letter from the Conservative leader urging B.C. to join the “Axe the Tax” push. Accepting Poilievre’s “campaign office and baloney factory” request would undercut climate action and hurt B.C. residents, he said. In the legislature, B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman explained, “British Columbia families are deeply concerned about the impacts of climate change on their kids, on their grandkids, on the economy, on communities that face wildfires and floods, and they want to be assured that we’re taking strong climate action. “They want to do their part. That’s why we’ve structured the carbon tax in a way that returns money to low- and middle-income British Columbians, which of course would not happen if we ceased the carbon tax,” Heyman said. Speaking bluntly, federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told the CBC: “Mr. Poilievre should stop lying to Canadians. He is telling lies on an ongoing basis and that’s just not something that a responsible leader should be doing. Mr. Poilievre’s plan, in terms of climate, is to let the planet burn,” and leave it to future generations to deal with the problem, Wilkinson said. But the Conservatives’ lack of a climate plan doesn’t seem to be worrying Canadians caught up in the anti-tax frenzy. More broadly, inciting voters’ anger toward the federal government over carbon pricing is only one aspect of the political distortions to which Canada, with its complex division of federal-provincial powers, seems particularly vulnerable in the post-factual environment. On another major issue, for instance, the premiers according to the polls seem to have successfully convinced about half of the public that Trudeau is responsible for the grim state of health care. The premiers, who have jurisdiction on health, did so through a national publicity campaign accusing Ottawa of not paying its fair share of health dollars at a time when many premiers were using budget surpluses for other purposes—i.e., not for health care. Along the same lines, the Liberal government has allowed itself to be saddled with much of the responsibility—in the public’s mind—for the acute shelter affordability crisis. This despite the fact that housing falls primarily under the constitutional ambit of the provinces and municipalities, which set the stage for the current mess by failing for decades to establish the conditions needed for adequate residential construction. Canadians should be paying more attention to all this because the anti-carbon tax campaign—as orchestrated by Canada’s right-wing leaders—is in essence the leading edge of a collective, well-orchestrated, and fortuitous assault on everything progressive in this country. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times

The triumph of misinformation

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The triumph of misinformation

The anti-carbon tax campaign is the leading edge of a collective, well-orchestrated, and fortuitous assault on everything progressive in this country.

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