
Called the “Just
Transition”, or what should be called the “Justin Transition”, in keeping with
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals climate change ideology, is the plan to shut down the
oil and gas industry in Western Canada. The
“transition” is the idea that the all the jobs that are lost in the industry
are to be replaced by clean, green jobs. There is no word of how the billions
of dollars that will be lost to the economy will be replaced or how the
dependence and cost of foreign imports of oil will be reduced.
So what we have
is a dedication to destruction of Canada’s
economy to show how virtuous we are in the climate change arena, grossly
overestimating the attention of the rest of the world to anything Canada does.
The emissions of carbon by Canada
are 1.5% of all global emissions. Russia,
India, China and the United States account for 55%. Only
the U.S.,
at 14%, has indicated any desire to reduce them, although there are no plans of
a Canada-like economic suicide.
In 2018,
Trudeau himself acknowledged that “even if Canada stopped everything tomorrow,
and the other countries didn’t have any solutions, it wouldn’t make a big
difference”. The Parliamentary Budget Office has said that “Canada’s own
emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change”.
Carbon
taxes, increasing the cost of gas, fuel oil, electricity, and everything that
has to be transported by truck or rail, which is just about everything. The
average family is now paying $710 per year more than they are getting back in
rebates. Because GST applies to the higher costs of energy, GST taxes also
increased. On top of that, the cost of the bureaucracy to administer all this
costs the taxpayers many millions of dollars more.
The second
carbon tax that kicked in on July 1, 2023 is charged to the energy producers if
they don’t reduce the carbon content of their fuels to a stipulated level. The
costs are then passed on to the consumer. British Columbia has its own carbon
tax which was increased on April 1, 2023 at 31 cents per litre, which added to
the federal tax of 19.4 cents per litre, makes it one of the most expensive
places in the country to fill up. The total cost of government taxes on a litre
of gas will be 69.4 cents by 2030. In the U.S. total federal and state taxes
average 11.7 cents per litre, with no signs of any increase.
Although liquid
natural gas (LNG) projects have gone ahead in BC for exports to Asia, any idea
of projects on the East Coast to supply Europe, whose relationship with their
supplier, Russia became made
more tenuous after their war with Ukraine, was shot down by Trudeau
in August 2022 supposedly as not economically feasible. Germany was told that there “never been a strong
business case” for liquefied natural gas exports from Canada. Japan
was told the same. This was without any real thought or analysis by anyone
knowledgeable on the subject. And in March, Spanish energy giant Repsol SA
withdrew
from a planned LNG project in New
Brunswick because of federal government
obstructionism.