Santa Justin Putting Lumps Of Coal In Every Canadian’s Stocking

Are there any so naïve who did not believe the Trudeau government would work to slyly entwine the protracted and immiserating COVID-19 crisis with its global warming obsession?

Take advantage of a time when economic reality is at its bleakest, the citizens of Canada anxious and unsettled, our national treasury pillaged, and — just for good measure, when Christmas itself is canceled — slap an outrageous carbon tax on everyone?

It’s a lump of coal (carbon) in every Canadian’s Christmas stocking, compliments of Santa J.

They are a shifty lot. Deliberately appropriating the emotions and character of the pandemic and rhetorically slapping them on “the fight against climate change.” It is political cynicism with a smiley face.

All that was missing from Justin Trudeau’s announcement of a $170-per-tonne carbon tax by 2030 was, “By the ghost of John A. Macdonald, here’s a magnificent, an incredible coincidence. My government’s plan for economic recovery from the COVID crisis matches perfectly with the policies I have been pursuing on global warming since the very first moment I thought of entering politics. Will wonders never cease.”

The reality: climate change is the Liberal agenda, has been their agenda, and will be their agenda, forever and ever, Amen. And they will latch that cause onto whatever opportunity, even a pandemic, arises.

It is the one dogma of this government, the prime minister’s one big bid to be a global player, and it was coming down, plague or not.

To try now to fuse it with a “recovery from COVID,” to link the Liberals’ predetermined goal to a completely extrinsic and unique event, to try to sell it as an answer to the economic devastation of the past year, is a breathless audacity.

Just as we follow the science on COVID, so too we must follow the science on global warming, was Trudeau’s message. This is tripe, and blatant tripe at that.

There is no equivalency, not even in metaphorical terms, between the real science of the first, which has in fact produced a vaccine for a hitherto unknown, present-day illness, and the “science” of the second, which much like astrology or futurism speaks to conditions 80 years out.

Global warming science is a hodgepodge of wild models, failed predictions, overzealous researchers, and a great clutter of thousands of advocacy organizations that have been bellowing “the science is settled” when it so plainly isn’t and can’t be, for over two decades now.

It has no precision, no empirical measurement, no replication. It does not follow the canons of experiment and observation.

It is a vague cloud of passionate alarmism linked to the feverish religiosity of radical environmentalism, and far too closely resembling, if not replicating, the outbursts of millenarianism that have been the hallmark of irrationality through the centuries.

Are they planning to submit the carbon tax for clinical trials? Can you put the carbon tax under a microscope? Can they read us the formula for stopping global warming?

The analogy is forced, meretricious, and hollow, a brazen attempt to borrow the prestige of a successful cure — done in miracle time — for a pandemic, and tape it on to a political project.

It cannot work is the next objection. A so-called carbon tax in Canada is not and can never be the answer to global warming.

Now, if Canada had a population of two billion people and was building coal mines faster than a swarm of gophers at a Bill Murray golf course, were our two billion citizens embarked on the greatest industrial drive in the history of mankind — then perhaps we might claim that a change in our policies would have a global impact.

But we are not. We are a fragment of a fragment in this presumed problem. It’s as if P.E.I. (a beautiful place) were the only province in Canada with such a (useless) tax, claiming that this would cleanse the rest of the entire country.

Where does this delusionary fixation that Canada has the means, the stature, and the key to solving global warming come from?

China is not on board. India is not on board. Russia doesn’t care. The U.S. has no federal carbon tax and yet has lowered carbon-dioxide emissions more successfully than Canada.

I ask again, where does Mr. Trudeau find the delusionary basis that if he slaps $170 a tonne on carbon-dioxide emissions in Canada, the world is saved from incineration?

The unflattering but objective truth is, whatever Canada does or does not do is at the very best marginal if not perfectly irrelevant to the scale of the presumed warming crisis.

The tax on its own merits is a joke. Whoever heard of a tax that comes with a promise that people will receive back more than they paid in? If the government wasn’t involved, you’d call that an investment.

Consider this: I ask you to give me $20. And if you do, I promise to give you back $25. Change “ask” to “force” in the first sentence and you have the germ of the great carbon tax.

Then of course there’s the question — do you really believe they will give back more than they take in? Do you really believe the rhetoric — don’t worry, you will pay more for fuel and groceries but the government taxing you will return your money and more?

This government? Which solemnly promised before the election not to raise the tax beyond $50 per tonne in 2022?

That this government, which is now in debt way past all our eyebrows, is nearly $400 billion in deficit and is presiding over a deeply wounded economy, is going to grab new money from taxpayers and then pass back more?

The only way it could more deeply injure the credibility of that promise is with an announcement it intends to bring the WE Charity’s Kielburger brothers back to administer the tax.

And next, or rather finally, we come to the biggest question of all. We come to Alberta, the province that carries the most weight, bears the most pain, and has the least say in this mad enterprise.

But that’s too much for an ending paragraph. It needs its own column, the theme of which probably should be:

What’s the Trudeau government’s plan for Alberta? Is it to reconcile with that industrious province, or — as seems more likely — to do its very best to chase it out of our up-to-now harmonious Confederation? Next time.

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