Roundup: Carney’s boneheaded “green incentives”

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Liberal leadership hopeful Mark Carney revealed his plan to replace the consumer carbon levy yesterday, and it’s a handwavey bunch of “green incentives” for things like improving your home insulation, furnace, appliances, or buying an electric vehicle. This would be offset by maintaining or increasing the industrial carbon pricing system, along with carbon border adjustments. Carney claimed that the current system isn’t working, which is false, because emissions have been driven down, and then shrugs and says it’s “too divisive,” which is the Liberals’ own gods damned faults for being such incompetent communicators about how the levy works, the rebates (remember when they thought that calling them “climate action incentives” was a genius idea?), and how reducing one’s own carbon footprint maximises those rebates. The government was absolutely incapable of communicating any of it, and Pierre Poilievre swooped in and filled the space with lies and disinformation.

I find Carney’s plan absolutely infuriating for a number of reasons. One of them is that this imparts a false narrative that carbon emissions reductions can happen for free for consumers. Even if there is no consumer-facing price, industrial emitters will pass along costs, and people won’t get a rebate for those higher costs, which hurts lower-income households harder. Everyone fawning over Carney’s economic credentials should be smacking themselves upside the head because of this fiction he is trying to perpetrate and just how economically illiterate it actually is.

Meanwhile, how much of an “incentive” can it really be for one-time purchases? You can only really re-insulate your house once, or buy a new furnace once every twenty years. There is no price disincentive to increased carbon use, and there is no ongoing reward for a low-carbon lifestyle, which the rebates provide. Again, very few people actually understand this because the government steadfastly refused to actually communicate how the levy and rebates actually work, how to maximise them, and how it rewards ongoing low-carbon behaviour. They hoped that legacy media and would communicate that (they absolutely will not), and it was basically up to five economists on Twitter, which is useless to ninety-five percent of the population. So now the people who have done the work to reduce their carbon footprint will now be punished, and people will take advantage of those one-time purchases for what? The pat on the back that they can give themselves? Everyone involved here needs to take a long, hard look at some of their life choices, but then again, if they had any modicum of self-reflection, they likely wouldn’t be in politics. What an absolute disaster.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drones injured four in Odessa, damaging a hospital and grain warehouse, while a missile attack seriously damaged a historic centre in the same city. Russian forces are also tightening their approach to Pokrovsk, which is a key logistics hub in the region. Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian command post in the Kursk region, and are also reporting that they haven’t seen any North Korean troops in the area for three weeks. Ukrainian drones also damaged an oil refinery in Russia’s Volgograd region.

Good reads:

  • Trump said that tariffs will start today, but maybe oil will be at a lower rate, and there was nothing we could do to stop him, meaning it wasn’t about the border.
  • Here is a broader look at the impacts of those potential tariffs, including damaging the continental relationship.
  • Justin Trudeau said that counter-measures to tariffs are ready to go, once we see exactly what they are.
  • The government has deferred the implementation of the capital gains changes, because why not let high-wealth individuals engage in tax arbitrage some more?
  • The fiscal monitor shows the deficit for the current fiscal year, from April to November, to be at $22.5 billion, and revenues are up.
  • Here is a deeper dive into what Justice Hogue said about the dangers of disinformation and what needs to done to protect against it.
  • Chrystia Freeland (correctly) says that counter-tariffs should target Tesla and other Elon Mush-owned entities to send a message.
  • A report shows that Freeland and Carney are the subjects of massive amounts of online disinformation, abuse, and conspiracy theories. (Look surprised, everyone!)
  • Some very smart former intelligence officials all drag Pierre Poilievre for refusing a security clearance and threat reduction briefings.
  • Alberta’s health minister fired the board of Alberta Health Services and put it under the control of her deputy minister, which totally isn’t suspicious at all.
  • Jennifer Robson looks at the lessons from pandemic supports as to how the government could better deal with supports for any tariff impacts from Trump.
  • Justin Ling calls out politicians as driving mistrust in Canadian institutions around foreign interference, not the foreign powers doing the interfering.
  • My weekend column points out why Danielle Smith’s call for a Canadian “border czar” is stupid and doesn’t fit with our system of government.

Odds and ends:

I was back on Canadaland to talk about Pierre Poilievre’s comments about gender.

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One thought on “Roundup: Carney’s boneheaded “green incentives””

  1. What I don’t get about Carney’s green incentives is there are already some in place. I got one last spring, first time ever I actually qualified for any such thing. It used to be something the government got positive comments for, till the media opted to let pollsters and Polievre write their copy.

    The carbon tax thing is frustrating. I’m going to miss the rebate.

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