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.