lorrie goldstein
TORONTO SUN
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory has thrown Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s green energy and climate change policies into chaos, because of the Liberal government’s failure to understand the importance of harmonizing Canada’s energy policies with those of the U.S.
By contrast, former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper understood that Canada could not afford to move independently of the U.S., its largest trading partner, on issues such as carbon taxation because it would endanger hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs dependent on Canada’s energy sector.
That’s why Harper ran on bringing in a cap and trade system (another form of a carbon tax) in the 2008 federal election when it looked like then U.S. president Barack Obama was going to succeed in having Congress approve cap and trade in the U.S.
When that fell through, however, Harper wisely backed off, for which he has been accused of climate hypocrisy by the Trudeau Liberals ever since, because due to ignorance or hubris, they have never understood that carbon pricing is an economic policy much more than an environmental one and needs to be generally consistent with U.S. policy.
Instead, the Trudeau government, the day before the U.S. election swept Trump back into power, announced emission caps for Canada’s oil and gas sector which critics warned will cost our economy up to 150,000 jobs by 2030 and leave the average family with up to $419 less in spending money per month.
By contrast, Trump who vows to “unleash American energy” production and who describes U.S. oil reserves as “liquid goal”, has promised the U.S. will “drill, baby, drill” during his presidency to increase its fossil fuel energy production while the Trudeau government wants to keep more of ours in the ground.
Trump has also vowed on his “very first day back” to scrap a moratorium on exporting low-emitting liquified natural gas (LNG) to Asian countries and other nations imposed by the Biden administration which Trump says is undermining U.S. economic growth.
Trudeau, on the other hand, insists here’s little demand for a long-term market selling Canada’s LNG exports internationally, other than to the U.S., which means they are sold at a substantial discount.
This despite the fact the Trudeau government itself boasts that Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil and fifth-largest producer of natural gas.
Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to end or reduce U.S. federal subsidies to boost electric vehicle sales there, which could impact similar programs in Canada.
Even the Trudeau government admitted the importance of keeping Canada’s energy policies consistent with those in the U.S. when it rewrote last year’s federal budget to include billions of dollars worth of government subsides to green energy producers, in order to compete with similar subsidies offered in Biden’s bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, although some of those may disappear under Trump’s plans as well.
Finally Trump, who has described climate change as a “hoax” and labelled outgoing Democratic president Joe Biden’s climate change polices as the “green new scam” has also promised to pull the U.S. out of the UN’s 2015 Paris climate deal — as he did the last time he was president — in order to remove its constraints on U.S. energy production.
Trudeau has shown no indication he is prepared to do the same.
Unlike Canada, the U.S. has never had a national carbon tax and yet has been more effective at lowering emissions than Canada.
