“Net-Zero Tyranny”

In many ways, it is incredible they got away with it for so long. For the past decade or so, mainstream politicians across Europe have stopped promising to improve their voters’ living standards. Instead, they have boasted about their plans to limit them. They have extolled the virtues of a higher cost of living, deindustrialisation and restrictions on personal freedoms. And they expected most people wouldn’t mind or perhaps even notice – because all this was to be done in the name of ‘saving the planet’ from climate change. But in 2023, that elite green consensus came crashing down to Earth.

Canada’s price on pollution is supposed to help battle global warming, but as it nears its fifth anniversary, nothing in Canadian politics is hotter.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has so successfully convinced Canadians the carbon price is to blame for inflation that he even earned begrudging respect for his “axe the tax” campaign from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Of course, Trudeau doesn’t agree with Poilievre’s sentiment.

First off, let’s be clear that I have nothing against electric vehicles. Never mind saving the planet, who wants to pull up to a grimy gas pump on a howling winter day and risk hypothermia for the privilege of paying whatever ransom oil companies are demanding for another tankful of “dirty” fuel?

So fine, electricity is good. But let’s be serious. Canada is just the latest country to set a firm date for the future to arrive. In our case it’s 2035, when gas guzzlers are out. No high-test for you! It will be a new dawn, an electric vehicle (EV) world. Ready or not, here we come.

We are governed by the stupid high school students.

Humanity has only a few years to act before the world may irreversibly plunge into an environmental catastrophe of global proportions, climate experts warned in a recent report. Their calls are muffled, however, by dozens of past dramatic predictions that have failed to pan out.

Environmental experts have been predicting doom for many decades. Most, though not all, of the prognostications involve climatic cataclysm that appears to be just around the corner, only to fizzle out as the deadline approaches.

It is hardly a state secret that our eco-obsessed elites want us to consume less, travel less and emit less carbon. At the centre of this miserable project has been the drive to tear people away from their cars.

Over the past few years, greens in government have launched all manner of anti-motorist schemes. There have been Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), so-called 15-minute cities and congestion charges like London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). Yet whenever anyone pushes back against these schemes, our green elites claim that none of it is really happening.

It’s been a year full of announcements for Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who has introduced a range of new climate policies and regulations over the last 12 months. Having recently returned from the COP28 global climate conference in Dubai, Guilbeault caught up with iPolitics to reflect on his year and outline his priorities moving forward.

He also chats about what’s next for impact assessment in Canada, why he thinks gas-powered vehicles are the new horse and buggies, as well as what he believes is the high point of his career.

Guilbeault means he sees cars being pulled by horses because electric vehicles are not practical as a replacement for ICE vehicles which will be few and only for the rich in his Brave New World.