Justin Trudeau continued his tour of southwestern Ontario over the past couple of days, meeting with local mayors and touring a Ford plant, and so on. But while he was talking about moving away from traditional manufacturing while in London, his stop in Windsor spoke about the need to support the auto sector as a pillar to diversify around, which seems to me to be a fairly big hedge since much of the problem with the auto sector is that it pretty much requires the government to keep feeding the beast with ever larger cash subsidies lest those manufacturers relocate elsewhere, which they generally end up doing anyway, while not enough is being done to transition those communities away from the expectation that they’ll get a decent paying job at the auto plant with a pension and benefits. Also, he needs to stop saying that the government put all of their eggs in the oil basket, because it’s like four percent of GDP, so it’s just not true. Another curious statement Trudeau made was that carbon pricing should be up to the provinces, which seems like a fairly fraught proposition because one can rather easily imagine the headaches that having a patchwork of pricing schemes around the country will create – carbon tax in one province, a technology levy in another, and cap-and-trade in yet another, while the federal government tries to book the overall reductions with no real commonality between them.

(1/n) Re: @JustinTrudeau and GHGs: I've worked on GHG policies at fed and prov level – we need a new way to deal with fed/prov on GHGs.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

(2/n) Federal regs end up pleasing the lowest common denominator – coal, autos, oil and gas, EITE, etc. and stringency drops for all.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

(3/n) A new framework, in the spirit of healthcare where fed gov't sets the boundaries, directs traffic, etc, has some promise.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

(4/n) but, in order for it to work, fed gov't needs clear def'ns for stringency, and a tasty carrot or a big stick to make provinces move

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

(5/n) Without that, we're in the world we're in now – each province does what it wants to do, and the fed gov't does little else.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

(6/n) So, let's see what details @JustinTrudeau puts on the policies, but this is a good/promising direction for Canada. #cdnpoli

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) January 22, 2015

Good reads:

• The Ottawa Citizen asks a couple of economists about the meaning of the interest rate drop.
• The Canadian Press takes their Baloney Meter™ to Joe Oliver’s statement that the US will need less of our oil, and well, it’s not pretty. And I quote “No, no, no, Jesus, no, Joe.”
• What’s that? The government programme to pay refugee claimants to abandon their claims and get a flight home proved to be a costly failure? You don’t say!
• Mike Moffatt tells about the economic decline in southwestern Ontario.
• Our new warships will be designed and built over the next 30 years, a length of time which makes it impossible for public servants and governments to plan, especially as funding envelopes get eaten up by inflation.
• Experts warn that the government’s move toward private chaplaincy services in prisons may worsen the spread of radicalisation as there are no prevention programmes.
• Kady O’Malley tracks Patrick Brown’s dual role of MP and Ontario PC leadership candidate.

Odds and ends:

Liberal MP Arnold Chan has disclosed that he has cancer, but says he still plans to serve.

The Senate has made a few administrative changes.

Thomas Mulcair pledges to restore CBC’s funding.

Louis Riel was acclaimed for a seat in the House of Commons 141 years ago yesterday.