“Net-Zero Tyranny”

Federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault posted a video over the weekend in which he was skating on the Rideau Canal.

“One of the reasons we are fighting climate change,” he says, “is to protect iconic places” like the Ottawa landmark.

It’s a perfectly reasonable point: the skate season on the canal has been shrinking in recent years amid warming Ottawa winters. Two years ago it didn’t open for skating at all.

Only at the Star and CBC will you find blind enthusiasm for Trudeau’s climate scam policy.

It seems as if Liberal leadership frontrunners Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland both realize they won’t save their party in the next election unless they take Pierre Poilievre’s advice and “axe the tax.”

The highly unpopular carbon tax, that is.

The carbon tax is (nearly) dead. Now what?

It might seem like a distant memory now, but it’s worth remembering that every major federal party ran in 2021 on a platform that included a consumer carbon tax.

Nearly every single Liberal, NDP and Conservative MP who currently sits in the House of Commons — up to and including Pierre Poilievre, who now says Canada needs a “carbon tax election” so he can “axe the tax” — won their seat while carrying a commitment to apply a price on carbon.

Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland would drop the consumer carbon tax — one of the Liberal government’s signature environmental policies — if elected leader, said a source close to her campaign.

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CBC News the former deputy prime minister will “make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions.”

But the source said Freeland “will not fight Canadians on a policy they have been clear they do not support.”

Update: Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland would scrap consumer carbon tax if elected Liberal leader, sources say

The consumer price on carbon is dead.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre can pat himself on the back — all those rallies, all those ads, all those talking points in the House of Commons — the case against the carbon price was so successfully prosecuted that the two leading Liberal leadership candidates are walking away from it.

The Star has learned that former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, who will announce his leadership bid Thursday in Edmonton, has been telling Liberal MPs in private conversations that he will repeal the consumer price, focus on industrial emitters instead, but also recognize that the Trudeau government’s approach did put more money back into people’s pockets, and so will deliver a middle class tax break as compensation.

Have they promised a corporate tax won’t be passed down to consumers.