Not only is this an anti-progressive, anti climate position, but his stated basis for it is based on right-wing disinformation.
— Emmett Macfarlane 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 (@EmmMacfarlane) September 12, 2024
Good job, NDP!
If the carbon tax really does end up going down and politicians genuinely care about minimizing costs on individuals then we're pretty much giving up the fight on climate. The entire point of a carbon tax is that it is the single lowest cost way to reduce emissions.
— Rob Gillezeau (@robgillezeau) September 12, 2024
Singh is committing political suicide before 37+ million people. https://t.co/ErCdQ9aj7N
— Dale Thompson (@daleethompson) September 12, 2024
Some commentary:
National Observer's Max Fawcett
Jagmeet Singh and Pierre Poilievre are dancing to the same tune
...This is a betrayal of his own party and membership on a bunch of different fronts. The federal carbon tax and rebate — one Singh and his party have backed enthusiastically for nearly five years — was based heavily on the tax introduced by Alberta’s NDP government in 2015.But it’s not just the Alberta wing of his party Singh is betraying. The BC NDP is in the midst of a very tight provincial election campaign in which the province’s carbon tax is a major bone of contention. The BC Conservatives have promised over and over again to eliminate it, while the governing BC NDP has stood behind it.Singh’s retreat here will almost certainly make that position more difficult to defend than it already was — an BC Conservatives have promised over and over again to eliminate it, while the governing BC NDP has stood behind it.Singh’s retreat here will almost certainly make that position more difficult to defend than it already was — and may even cost the party the election. Indeed, the BC Conservative Party released a statement on Thursday “thanking” Singh for his comments. ...Worst of all, perhaps, is his willingness to endorse Poilievre’s deliberately dishonest framing of the carbon tax and its supposed impact on working people. Let’s be clear: all of the arguments Poilievre and his proxies have made about the carbon tax’s supposedly inflationary effects on grocery prices, housing, and the cost of living have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. As Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem noted last September, the carbon tax adds a grand total of 0.15 per cent to inflation. Case in point: while the carbon tax has increased by an additional $30 per tonne since inflation peaked at 8.1 per cent in June 2022, inflation itself has come all the way down to 2.5 per cent as of this July. You’d be pretty hard pressed to draw a correlation there.And yet, that’s what Poilievre keeps doing — and what Singh has implicitly endorsed with his comments. Singh also traded in the demonstrably false idea that the carbon tax disproportionately hurts lower-income people, even though the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s analysis has repeatedly shown they get more back in rebates than they pay. Even when you include the PBO’s modeled economic impacts — that, controversially, don’t assign any cost to inaction on climate change — the lowest earning 40 per cent of Canadians net out ahead. Eliminating the tax and rebate would therefore take money out of the pockets of low-income Canadians. The biggest beneficiaries, meanwhile, would be the richest Canadians, with wealthy Albertans being the biggest winners of all. Those are supposed to be the voters the CPC caters to, not the NDP. Perhaps Singh’s own status as a relatively wealthy person is interfering with his ability to see the politics here clearly.All of this might — might — be excusable if Singh had a ready-made alternative to propose. Alas, to borrow Donald Trump’s widely mocked words from this week’s presidential debate, he only has the concepts of a plan at this point. “We’ve been working on a plan,” he said Thursday, “and we’ll be releasing our plan, our vision, for how we can do that in a stronger way in the coming months.”Said plan will apparently focus on making “big polluters” pay their “fair share”. That might be difficult given the heavy lifting the current carbon tax regime is already doing on that front. d may even cost the party the election. Indeed, the BC Conservative Party released a statement on Thursday “thanking” Singh for his comments. ...Worst of all, perhaps, is his willingness to endorse Poilievre’s deliberately dishonest framing of the carbon tax and its supposed impact on working people. Let’s be clear: all of the arguments Poilievre and his proxies have made about the carbon tax’s supposedly inflationary effects on grocery prices, housing, and the cost of living have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. As Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem noted last September, the carbon tax adds a grand total of 0.15 per cent to inflation. Case in point: while the carbon tax has increased by an additional $30 per tonne since inflation peaked at 8.1 per cent in June 2022, inflation itself has come all the way down to 2.5 per cent as of this July. You’d be pretty hard pressed to draw a correlation there.And yet, that’s what Poilievre keeps doing — and what Singh has implicitly endorsed with his comments. Singh also traded in the demonstrably false idea that the carbon tax disproportionately hurts lower-income people, even though the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s analysis has repeatedly shown they get more back in rebates than they pay. Even when you include the PBO’s modeled economic impacts — that, controversially, don’t assign any cost to inaction on climate change — the lowest earning 40 per cent of Canadians net out ahead. Eliminating the tax and rebate would therefore take money out of the pockets of low-income Canadians. The biggest beneficiaries, meanwhile, would be the richest Canadians, with wealthy Albertans being the biggest winners of all. Those are supposed to be the voters the CPC caters to, not the NDP. Perhaps Singh’s own status as a relatively wealthy person is interfering with his ability to see the politics here clearly.All of this might — might — be excusable if Singh had a ready-made alternative to propose. Alas, to borrow Donald Trump’s widely mocked words from this week’s presidential debate, he only has the concepts of a plan at this point. “We’ve been working on a plan,” he said Thursday, “and we’ll be releasing our plan, our vision, for how we can do that in a stronger way in the coming months.”Said plan will apparently focus on making “big polluters” pay their “fair share”. That might be difficult given the heavy lifting the current carbon tax regime is already doing on that front.
Evan Scrimshaw
...Jagmeet Singh today announced what you might call the concept of a plan to oppose the Trudeau carbon tax on the grounds that it puts the burden on the “backs of working people”, an attack line straight out of the CPC playbook. He is opposing a carbon tax he has voted for 4 times this year alone because he’s a fraud, a cancer, and completely and utterly willing to throw everything he has ever believed in in his life for the prospect of maybe, finally getting the validation he so desperately wants and will never get.This is a horrible decision politically for Jagmeet - it won’t do a god damn thing to stop NDP voters who have switched to Poilievre, and it makes you look insincere and weak. Obviously it’s worth a question of whether and why a party that has to defend seats in Skeena and Kootenay and Comox and Campbell River and Timmins ever willingly signed up for a carbon tax brought in by a party of urban elites in the first place, given the easy way to demagogue the policy as built by people in cities for people in cities. (That rural and regional Canadians get a bigger rebate is relevant on policy grounds, but perception problems were always a risk.)But at this point, Singh has taken the damage he’s going to take on his right flank. The damage is done. From here, his choices were either to stand up for his beliefs and earn credibility for standing up for the courage of his convictions, or to throw them out of the window for perceived political expediency, while invigorating the Greens. Because spoiler, the actual winner of this column is the Greens, because if you’re 25, care about climate change, care about the Palestinian people, and think Trudeau is too [insert your complaint here], the NDP just took a shit on the idea of wanting your votes....The dirty little secret of Canadian politics is that the NDP often propose ideas that end up being things the Liberals want to do. ...Even when the idea is a “Liberal” one, the NDP’s very existence and threat to take Liberal seats keeps the Liberals on their toes. It is a very good thing for this country that we have two parties that can make each other better.What the NDP are doing is ruining that situation. It is beholden to a man who is fundamentally unserious and fundamentally breaking a Canadian institution. Jagmeet’s NDP is a disgrace, led by a man who holds the Canadian people in such significant contempt he thinks we’re all too stupid to know we’re being lied to. Jagmeet thinks that the country is too stupid to notice when he’s talking about his deep understanding of the cost of living crisis while wearing a Rolex. He thinks we’re too stupid to remember that he has voted for the carbon tax more times than we can count before he suddenly had his Damascene conversion. He also thinks we’re too stupid to realize he’s doing this ~100 hours before the polls close in Elmwood, where his candidate is in a tight fight against the CPC....For all of Singh’s histrionics, he ripped up the Confidence and Supply Agreement because he’s polling badly and he did this because he’s polling badly. He doesn’t actually believe the carbon tax hurts the poor and middle class, because if he did he’d have used his leverage to fix it. We know from his complete refusal to advocate for a new taxation and subsidy model that he knows what everyone else knows, which is that the economic benefits of the carbon tax go down the higher up the income scale you go. He knows this. For the character he plays in front of the cameras, he’s not actually braindead stupid. And yet, he’s willing to debase himself to try and get the 15% in Leger or the 16% in Ipsos back up to 19%. Frat hazings are less pathetic than Jagmeet’s ritual humiliation, mostly because at least a frat hazing means you actually get the thing you want at the end of it.Jagmeet’s Carbon Tax capitulation won’t save the NDP seats. It won’t advance progressive causes. It won’t make the air easier to breathe. It only serves as a reminder of how far the NDP have debased themselves with a pathetic, sorry excuse of a leader, a puppet to Poilievre, and a disgrace to every cause he claims to care about.
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