“While we support creating a level playing field between large foreign streaming services and Canadian broadcasters, C-10 is a bad piece of legislation giving too much power to the CRTC to regulate the internet and provides no clear guidelines for how that power will be used,” Reyes said in a statement Monday morning.
Conservative Party of Canada leader Erin O’Toole has proposed a climate change plan he says will meet Canada’s Paris agreement commitments without killing jobs. Yet one week after announcing it, Justin Trudeau increased Canada’s emissions targets and the media is already asking O’Toole why his plan doesn’t go further. True North’s Andrew Lawton says this is proof the Conservatives will never win by playing on the left’s turf.
Expanding on the last several weeks’ columns here, the federal Liberals apparently believe that just 20 months after the last election, they can win back a majority on the basis of their handling of the COVID pandemic and of the much declaimed “existential crisis” of climate change. They will probably be justified in their confidence if the Conservatives, the most unsuccessful principal political party in any important country in the world, allow them to get away with such a spurious reformulation of these issues. In fact, Canada’s entire political community voluntarily panicked with great shared enthusiasm at the arrival of the novel coronavirus, and unanimously agreed with the general drift in the Western countries towards an almost total shutdown of the country in order to “flatten the curve.”
According to sources close to O’Toole, very few people within the party knew about the new climate plan until it was reported by the media.
“…The latest reliable statistics show that Canada leads the world in percentage of Covid deaths in homes for the elderly: 70 per cent of our total, compared to 27 per cent in the UK and Germany, 33 per cent in Israel, 38 per cent in the United States, 47 per cent in Sweden, and 59 per cent in Spain. If we had just protected the elderly and infirm a year ago, we might have been able to save at least a third of those who have died, at a minimum cost in inconvenience and in money. Why doesn’t Erin O’Toole say something about that? There are more than 40 countries with a higher level of per capita vaccination than Canada. Amongst them are not just obvious scientifically advanced nations like Israel and the United States and the UK, but Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. Has the official opposition uttered one word about these completely unacceptable, uncompetitive and ultimately death-dealing numbers?”
Erin O’Toole takes one for the team with his carbon-pricing plan
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s about-face on carbon pricing may not improve the odds that he will become prime minister. The opposite is just as likely. But come what may in the next election and beyond, he will be leaving his party a legacy most Conservatives should eventually come to appreciate.
Far from making the party politically bulletproof on an issue that is increasingly stunting his party’s growth outside of the Prairies, O’Toole’s climate plan — at least in the short term — puts the Conservatives right in the middle of the climate change crossfire.
This I suspect lays out the thinking behind the CPC’s decision to ape LPC policy. Fuck the rest of Canada and concentrate on Ontario and Quebec for electoral success, somewhere down the road. Perhaps not this century but surely maybe some time. It’s worked for the Liberals after all.
‘Not a tax at all’: O’Toole on party’s carbon price loyalty program
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is pushing back against criticism by some that a key pillar of the party’s new climate plan is akin to a carbon tax, a Liberal-instituted policy he has long criticized.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday, O’Toole says the party’s proposed carbon pricing mechanism is “not a tax at all” because money is not collected by the government.
It’s just like Interac says O’Toole! Really he said that.
OTTAWA — When Conservative leader Erin O’Toole announced on Thursday that his party will include a carbon price on consumer fuels as part of their election platform, internal backlash was inevitable.
Scrapping “Trudeau’s carbon tax” is a core promise the Conservative Party has made to its supporters for years. O’Toole won the Conservative leadership race last year while repeatedly promising to get rid of it, even signing a pledge that he would never introduce a carbon tax of his own.
“I, Erin O’Toole, promise that, if elected Prime Minister of Canada, I will: Immediately repeal the Trudeau carbon tax; and, reject any future national carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme.” — A Canadian Taxpayers Federation pledgesigned by Erin O’Toole when soliciting support for his bid to lead the Conservative party.
Last seen falling off his horse on the road to Green Damascus, Erin O’Toole is thought by many to be the leader of a party known as Conservative.
The principle behind a carbon tax is to make people use less fossil fuel energy by making it more expensive to buy it.
This applies whether it’s gasoline to power our cars, or natural gas to heat our homes.
OTTAWA–There was no hint when Conservative caucus met Wednesday that Erin O’Toole was about to reverse party orthodoxy and propose a carbon levy.
Sources who spoke to the Star said Conservative MPs were blindsided by O’Toole’s announcement Thursday that his climate change plan included a consumer carbon price of $20 per tonne, rising to $50 per tonne in 2030.
It was a stunning reversal for the Conservative leader, who pledged to scrap the Liberal government’s carbon levy — which Conservatives have routinely labelled a “carbon tax” — throughout the party’s leadership contest last year.
But in speaking to Conservative MPs, and later at an Ottawa news conference, O’Toole steadfastly denied that his proposed price on carbon amounted to a “carbon tax.”
Last summer, @erinotoole told us he would repeal carbon taxes. Today, he’s breaking that promise. #canpoli #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/oXiZfnjjHp
— Taxpayer.com (@taxpayerDOTcom) April 15, 2021
Asked to rank their impression of federal leaders on a scale from zero to 10 — with zero being “not at all impressed” and 10 being “very impressed” — O’Toole scored the lowest of the three major party leaders at the high end of the scale.
Just 11 per cent of respondents said they were highly impressed by O’Toole (a rating of seven to 10).
By comparison, 16 per cent said the same for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and 17 per cent for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
There’s bad news then there’s Erin O’Toole.
Erin O’Toole’s big problem with right-wing media could hurt his election chances
“Let’s face it, federal Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is a dud and a dud is never going to defeat Justin Trudeau.”
Ouch!
That stinging criticism of the beleaguered Tory leader came not from a progressive columnist at the Toronto Star or a left-leaning commentator on a CBC political panel.
Rather, it’s from Lorne Gunter, a senior political columnist at the conservative-leaning Edmonton Sun, whose opinion pieces also appear in right-wing papers such as the Toronto Sun.
After years of criticizing the Liberal carbon tax, the Conservative party is proposing a climate plan that also puts a price on carbon for consumers, according to a copy of the party’s climate change plan obtained by CBC News.
But instead of the Liberal carbon tax-and-rebate system, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is proposing to charge a levy on fuel purchases and use the money to fund personalized savings accounts, which Canadians can use for environmentally friendly purchases.
“We recognize that the most efficient way to reduce our emissions is to use pricing mechanisms,” notes the plan.
It is almost unimaginable, given the horrifying shambles that the present federal government has made of almost everything, that it is potentially on the brink of a premature election, confident that it can regain a majority. The only explanation for this is the traditional unfeasibility of the federal Conservative party. Once the Liberals adopted the policy of alternating English and French-Canadian leaders, and the Conservatives obligingly recruited some prominent English-speaking Liberal politicians to mobilize the anglophone majority in the country to impose conscription on French-Canadians who had no particular reason to feel any filial loyalty to the British or the French in the hecatomb of the First World War, the preeminence of the Liberals was assured. The only federal Conservative leader since that time who was knowledgeable enough of Quebec, and of national political currents generally, to compete on an equal footing with the Liberals was Brian Mulroney. And except for Jean Chrétien, who had the benefit of running against a completely fragmented opposition, he was the only prime minister to win two consecutive majority elections since Louis St. Laurent in 1953.
OTTAWA — Erin O’Toole assured Conservative supporters that he never hid who he was in his bid to secure the party leadership, telling a high-profile conference on Saturday that the “true blue” campaign he ran to secure the party helm does reflect his true colours.
O’Toole fielded questions about his authenticity during an evening question-and-answer session that closed out a conference hosted by the Canada Strong and Free Network, formerly the Manning Centre.
He’s being branded as “Liberal-lite” in some quarters, the same descriptor O’Toole once leveled at former rival and ex-parliamentarian Peter MacKay during last year’s leadership race.
