ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Does Canada have any adults left in charge? Serious question. What's with all the talk here about carbon taxes when inflation is so out of control that people are forced to consider the size of the hole that a pack of marshmallow Easter Peeps would blast in their budget? Starting on April 1, Canadians have to pay more for the fairy dust better known as a metric ton of carbon, with the price jumping from $48 USD to $59 USD. All to fight climate change, even though no one has any clue how many polar bears have been saved as a result of Jim from Oshawa paying more to fill up his Chevy.

The fact that carbon pricing is a giant scam shouldn’t come as a surprise. But what’s the point of a scam that doesn’t make the scammer rich? The Australian coal industry long promoted the idea that its coal exports were cleaner than the coal exports of other countries. But in 2022, an independent Aussie member of parliament tabled thousands of pages from a coal industry executive turned whistleblower suggesting falsified data and widespread scamming to qualify coal exports as “clean” and to keep carbon pricing low and export revenue high against its more “filthy” global competitors.

Banks and corporations making pledges of ‘net-zero’ emissions are also taking the public for a ride, according to a United Nations report released in 2022 at the COP27 climate change conference, accusing them of promoting a green agenda for marketing purposes and as a strategy to gain more business, all while failing to actually back up the claims in practice.

At least US President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, peddled as a climate change initiative, was really just a pretext to bamboozle Europe to US economic benefit by luring green industry away with tax credits and abundant energy in the wake of Biden’s egging them into cutting themselves off from cheap Russian gas “for Ukraine”. Why can’t Trudeau at least make his climate scams work for Canadians, too?

Not long ago, Canada could afford to sit back and just virtue signal incessantly with little concern for return on investment, all because things were going so well economically. But then the actual adults in the room seemed to succumb to peer pressure.

Canada has always ultimately been run by business interests, but there’s recent indication that they’re now getting high on the government's ideological supply. When Trudeau’s government invoked the Emergencies Act — historically reserved for terrorist threats — and blocked bank accounts of more than 200 citizens in response to a bunch of honking truckers and their supporters gathering in Ottawa to protest the government’s discriminatory and authoritarian Covid mandates, it came amid former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney crying about foreign interference in the funding of the Freedom Convoy movement. The notion has since been totally debunked by Canadian intelligence. It also emerged that some top executives of Canada’s big banks referred to the protesters as “terrorists” and wanted the government to designate them as such in a conversation with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

None of this is the rhetoric of thoughtful pragmatists. It’s unclear how deep the tip of this particular iceberg goes, but when captains of economy are surfing the same brainwaves as ideologues like Trudeau and Freeland, then there’s a serious problem.

So then comes the course correction, consisting of even more virtue signaling. In the span of just a few days last week, Trudeau announced two measures ostensibly meant to undo some of the economic damage that he's inflicted. First, rent payments — which are often now higher than the mortgage payments that people increasingly can’t afford — would count toward people’s credit score. Several social media users suggested that Trudeau must mean “social credit” score — in reference to the national credit rating blacklist in China that blocks citizens from access to basic aspects of everyday life if their government-monitored behavior is considered problematic. Clearly an indication that people are fed up with Trudeau's increased (and increasingly costly) meddling that's impacting their lives. Speaking of which, just days later, Trudeau also announced that his government would make birth control free. Canadians were quick to remind him that “free” just means that everyone else in Canada is paying for it. Maybe just try working on getting the price of a pack of lettuce below $15 so people can buy their own contraception?

Ukraine also just received another $1.5 billion USD from Canada to help cover Kyiv’s budget deficit and social programs. Because Canadians really don’t need the cash for anything. Until the cost of everyday living comes back down, virtue signaling for the climate, Ukraine, or anything else is a luxury that Canadians simply can’t afford.