EDITORIAL: Trudeau’s carbon tax fails—again

article content

What happened to the Trudeau administration’s promise that its federal carbon tax would “stimulate innovation and investment in clean technologies and foster long-term growth opportunities”?

article content

That Canada didn’t have to match US President Joe Biden’s $369 billion in green energy technology subsidies?

article content

Because, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed last year, “One of the reasons the US needs to do so much more is because it doesn’t have a price for pollution.” It needs to do what we’re already doing through regulations, incentives, and subsidies at a price for pollution.”

On Monday, Stellantis, one of the world’s largest automakers, announced it had halted construction of a $5 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Windsor, Ontario, claiming the Trudeau government was failing in its financial commitments to the project not complied.

The company apparently wants a deal similar to the one the federal and Ontario governments recently gave to German automaker Volkswagen, which is spending $7 billion on an electric vehicle battery plant in St. Thomas, Ontario.

article content

In other words, this is the future of clean energy technology in Canada – or at least so-called clean energy technology, because mining the raw materials needed to make batteries for electric vehicles is an environmental nightmare.

It’s a future of massive public subsidies paid for by Canadian taxpayers to compete with the massive public subsidies the Biden administration is offering to attract green energy projects in the US.

As for Trudeau’s national carbon tax, it was supposed to make a subsidy war with the US obsolete because Americans don’t have one – it turns out the Prime Minister’s claim was nonsense.