Lab creates buzz with news of cocaine production

Someone at Adastra Labs in Langley, B.C., must have been sampling the wares when they announced last Thursday that they would produce, sell, and distribute cocaine.

image: MedlinePlus

The story created a buzz at the Daily Hive (dailyhive.com) where I saw it first.

I was incredulous. My first reaction was that it must be a joke.

But it was no joke. The news was carried by reliable Canadian sites and even in France and the UK.

B.C. Premier Eby said he was “astonished” when he heard the news. He had not been consulted by Health Canada who approved Adastra.

“I find it more than a little bit frustrating that Health Canada is not apparently in line with us in terms of the direction we’re going,” said Eby. “We need to work together on the toxic drug crisis and our response to it.”

Prime Minister Trudeau he was “as surprised as” Eby, He said that the federal government was “working very quickly” with Adastra Labs “to correct the misunderstanding” caused by the company’s statement on commercialization.

My second reaction was that it was a ballsy plan to snub the law just as shops had done by openly selling pot before it was legalized.

B.C. has decriminalized possession the possession of 2.5 grams of drugs, including cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and morphine. Shops like Adastra were going to dare the cops to arrest them and challenge the stupid decriminalization law, I thought.

The problem with decriminalization is that while possession may be legal, the sale of drugs is not. What sense does it make to possess something you can’t legally buy? Adastra Labs must have been flouting the law to make that absurdity obvious.

Then Adastra Labs revised its original statement. They won’t sell to just anyone.

It turns out that their amended Controlled Drug and Substances Dealer’s Licence does not permit the firm to sell cocaine and other drugs to the general public. Under the Dealer’s Licence, Adastra Labs is only permitted to sell to other licensed dealers who have drugs listed on their licence including pharmacists, practitioners, hospitals for research purposes under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Confusion aside, the amended licences to Adastra Labs represents progress. Victoria’s Sunshine Earth Labs also has an amended licence to produce, sell and distribute MDMA cocaine, opium and morphine to other licensed dealers.

Sunshine Earth issued a revised statement, saying the company is licensed to conduct activities with these controlled substances “under tight limitations imposed by Health Canada.”

This means that doctors now have access to drugs, including MDMA and psilocybin for psychotherapy on behalf of patients who have serious, treatment-resistant, or life-threatening conditions.

A psychedelics company has received federal approval to use MDMA (ecstasy) to treat patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Numinus, a Vancouver-based health company specializing in psychedelic research, will treat 20 people suffering from PTSD using MDMA-assisted therapy.

The panic that hippies were blowing their minds on mind-warping drugs is subsiding.

Now MDMA and psilocybin are joining other mood-enhancing chemicals that have been legal for years; drugs like Effexor (Venlafaxine), available since 2008, used to treat depression, anxiety and panic attacks.

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The green-washing of B.C.’s wood pellet industry

Our wood pellet industry is clear cutting the province under the pretense that pellets are a green source of fuel.

Much of the industry is in B.C.’s inland rainforests and it doesn’t get a lot of attention from environmental groups. Not like the coastal rainforests where protesters lay their bodies in front of heavy machinery.

image: CBC

BC’s inland rainforest, which once totalled over 1.3 million hectares, is endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Their study found that if current logging rates continue, inland rainforests could experience ecological collapse within a decade.

From the comfort of my car, it seems like B.C.’s forests go on forever but that’s an illusion. The study from the conservation group looked at forests beyond 100 metres from a road and found them to be in danger. It found that 95 percent of its core habitat had been lost since 1970.

How could our inland forests be under threat when lumber mills are shutting down and B.C. has lost 50,000 forestry jobs since 2000?

The answer is automation and the wood pellet industry.

The Wood Pellet Association of Canada says that B.C.’s forests produce more pellets than anywhere else in the world and Prince George is the industry’s epicentre.

The pellet industry claims that burning wood, unlike coal and other fossil fuels, is “carbon neutral” and helps slow climate change. Their fuzzy logic tries to convince us that when new trees are planted to replace those that are cut, then emissions from burning are balanced by the sequestration of carbon. The Paris Climate Agreement agrees.

But tree pellets burn in an instant and trees take decades to grow. The climate crisis is immediate. We can’t wait decades before tackling the problem.

Many scientists disagree with the fuzzy logic. In an open letter from 500 scientists and economists, they warned that burning pellets “is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels.”

Mary Booth, director of the non-profit Partnership for Policy Integrity, says: “The whole thing boils down to the obvious fact that burning things emits carbon quickly and re-growing things to sequester carbon takes a long time, (Walrus, March 28, 2022).”

The pellet industry makes a number of green boasts; one that that pellets are a sustainable by-product of forests already being cut. This may have been true at first when pellets were made from lumber waste, such as sawdust and slash. But that’s no longer true.

The tiny volunteer environmental group, Conservation North, has discovered stacks of logs at the pellet facility at the Medowbank Facility, 75 kilometers south of Prince George. Most trees were under a foot thick, but some were much larger.

The pellet industry claims that it is not cutting old growth forests. While that may be technically true -old growth trees in the interior are defined as 140 years old- nonetheless, they are very close to that age.

Large swathes of our interior rainforests are being clear cut. Not only are those forests home to flora and fauna but when those trees die, they replenish the soil for future growth.

Our forests are being sacrificed to satisfy some misguided notion that pellets are “green” source of energy like wind, solar and hydro. 

Trump’s great idea: rake the forests floors clean

Former President Trump has come up with another great idea. Everyone agrees that the source of wildfires is the buildup of flammable materials on the forest floor, so the obvious solution is to clean it up.

“I see again the forest fires are starting,” Trump told a rally in Pennsylvania. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

Well, duh. With B.C.’s forests littered with flammable materials, just clean them up.

Trump is very wise. He listens to world leaders. Trump said: “I was with the president of Finland and he said: ‘We have, much different, we are a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation. And they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”

The Finns are so negative, people like Malla Hadley who tweeted: “I grew up in Finland. a) it rains all year round. b) we have a lengthy and cold winter. c) Finland is a sparsely populated country with just over 5mil ppl, with land size ~3/4 of CA and most of it forests and lakes. d) no friggin body is raking the forests.”

But why not accept great ideas? Make Canada Rake Again!

Get the school kids out of their stuffy classrooms and into the forests this winter with their rakes. Let them commune with nature in a productive way.

Hard work builds character, contributes to success, and promotes happiness. Once the kids lift their faces from their screens, they will be liberated by a work ethic.

Giving kids trophies and high grades without effort has negative effects. When kids are rewarded without making the effort, it reduces confidence, promotes dependency, and robs them of their personal dignity.

It takes the right person to set up these work camps for kids, someone with the moral authority and integrity of Donald Trump. Since the former president is busy restoring the once great Republican Party, we’ll have to find someone in Canada.

That person is Maxime Bernier, leader of People’s Party Of Canada.

Bernier can set kids straight on role models. We certainly don’t want kids following wimpy young people like Greta Thunberg. Of her, Bernier tweeted: ”@GretaThunberg is clearly mentally unstable. Not only autistic, but obsessive-compulsive, eating disorder, depression and lethargy, and she lives in a constant state of fear.”

Environmentalists plan to radically transform our society through hysterical fear that the end of the world is coming. We must defend our freedom to burn fossil fuel and preserve our way of life.

Bernier’s work camps for kids would instill pride in the way that Canada was before the immigration of non-whites. But, in a demonstration of magnanimity, there would be camps for white kids and camps for non-white kids.

Songs would be composed for the kids to sing while raking the forests, songs of the glory of the Aryan race.

Kids would carry little red books with the sayings of their great leader, Maxime Bernier. In quiet times of contemplation, they would be inspired by the truths within.

B.C. denies the mentally ill their constitutional rights

“Unlike most of country, B.C.’s legislation does not provide a lawyer for people with mental illness facing involuntary detention,” says Jay Chalke, B.C.’s ombudsperson (Globe and Mail, September 2, 2020)

Image: In These Times

Unlike other Canadian jurisdictions, mentally ill people can be held indefinitely -B.C. does not have an automatic review of ongoing detention.

That means that people, who may or may not be mentally ill, can be held endlessly.

Detention of people under the guise of mental illness can have political overtones. The Soviet Union misused psychiatry to get rid of political opponents. The term “philosophical intoxication,” a pseudo-scientific term for mental disorders, was applied to people who disagreed with the country’s Communist leaders.

I don’t mean to suggest that the government of B.C. is detaining political opponents under the Mental Health Act.  But systemic paternalism and racism can play a role.

And I don’t deny that mentally ill people who are violent need be detained for their own safety and the safety of others. The forced detention of unstable persons under the Mental Health Act is not the issue.

Given the treatment of Indigenous people as wards of the state, the detention of First Nations persons presents a complicating layer.

Take the case of “A.H.,” a First Nations 39-year-old woman who was wrongfully detained for almost a year.

In a court case between A.H. and the Fraser Health Authority, the Supreme Court of B.C. learned that A.H. had been held against her will and that she was not even found to be mentally ill.

It wasn’t a simple case -A.H. suffers from cognitive impairments and mental health issues. She has a history of substance abuse, family violence and sexual abuse. She was also diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).

A.H.’s mother sexually exploited her by pressuring her to drink alcohol and take drugs to make her compliant to sexual abuse. She did not have clean clothes or sufficient food.

After she was detained, authorization to hold her longer than 48 hours under the Mental Health Act expired. Despite that, she remained captive. She asked staff to provide a lawyer but staff said they couldn’t help. She was not told why she was being detained and tried to escape. On at least one occasion, A.H. was physically restrained with mechanical restraints that tied her to the bed. She was forced to take medications, including sedatives.

In her ruling of the case in 2019, Honourable Madam Justice Warren said:

“However, the procedures for Mental Health Act certification were not followed and there is no evidence that A.H. was certifiable under that legislation.

“The detention decision deprived A.H. of her liberty, the most fundamental of her rights.  The consequences could scarcely have been more serious.  It is apparent that A.H. did not understand the basis for her detention or the reasons for it.  She expressed, multiple times during the course of the detention, confusion about her ongoing detention, repeatedly asking why she could not go home.”

The detention of unstable mentally ill people under B.C.’ Mental Health Act is necessary for the protection of themselves and others. But the unjustified detention of people under the pretext of doing it for their own good smacks of paternalism, and in the case of First Nations people, colonialism.

I was wrong about the Site C dam

Despite what I said earlier, Site C is a mistake. The massive dam is being built in the Peace River region of northeastern British Columbia.

image:

Dams are not a mistake. Hydroelectricity has made B.C. the envy of the world with cheap, renewable electricity produced with nothing but water falling through turbines.

Unlike other renewable sources of electricity, hydroelectricity is always on. In 2015, I effused:

“Unlike other sources of green energy, hydro power is ready to go when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Water–filled dams are like a huge battery, fully charged, ready to produce power at the flick of a switch.”

Can you really have too much green electricity?, I thought.

Dams are good but not Site C. Let me list the problems:

The first is the cost. As a concept, the cost of Site C started out at $3.5-billion. When plans were actually drawn up, price tag rose to $6.9-billion. Then the estimate rose to $8.8 billion after the BC Liberals approved it in 2014. When the NDP government decided to go ahead with the dam, the estimate was rose to $10.7 billion. The costs are sure to go up further due to the next vexing problem:

The soil at the dam site is unstable. Soft sedimentary shale underlies the construction site and the problem was evident from the start. Harvey Elwin, one of the country’s most experienced dam engineers noted that he’s never seen such appalling foundation conditions for a project of this scale. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that a proposed fix would that would make matters worse -pouring massive amounts of concrete into the site would exacerbate instability and “could cause the notoriously unstable shale rock to move even further.”

Then there is the problem of demand. By the time the dam is scheduled to be completed in 2025, there is expected to be little need for the power it produces. Right now, we have 50 per cent more electricity than we need. And that doesn’t include the large quantity available under rights of the Columbia River Treaty.

To recover the costs of the dam, the price we pay for electricity will not be cheap. The new price will be $120/MWh, even more than the $87/MWh from Independent Power Producers -a rate considered to be too high; and much more than the price of $30/MWh under the Columbia River Treaty.

The politics of the dam, always convoluted, are simpler than the construction of the dam. BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark vowed to push Site C through in 2014. When NDP Premier Horgan inherited the project, he claimed that the project had been developed beyond the point of no return.

The real reason Horgan went ahead with Site C was because to cancel it would have given the opposition BC Liberals a chance to tag the NDP with the usual “anti-business” label. And the BC Liberals could hardly oppose a project they had started.

Now that Horgan has a majority government he will reconsider the future of the dam, cut his losses, and pull the plug on Site C.

You heard it first here.

Should B.C. bubble-up with neighbours?

Canada’s four Atlantic Provinces have agreed to open their borders to each other on July 3, creating a regional pandemic bubble. What are the opportunities for B.C.?

image: Britannica

The Atlantic bubble means that travellers within the region will not be required to self-isolate after crossing the borders. Travellers will have show proof of residency with a driver’s licence or health card.

As we know from creating bubble families, picking who you want to bubble up with is tricky -a bit like asking someone to dance. Who is desirable? Are they available? Do they practice safe social intercourse?

For the Atlantic Provinces, it was easy. Not only are they attractive because they form a natural geographic area but also there are no active COVID-19 cases, with the exception of New Brunswick and that was caused by a doctor who was infected upon returning from Quebec. They form a natural regional bubble that’s desirable, available, and safe.

Countries can bubble up with neighbours as well. While not quite bubbles, the European Union has loosened border restrictions this week to 15 countries including Canada but not the U.S. Russia, or Brazil. The loosening includes countries that have controlled the spread of COVID-19.

But while some countries are desirable, they are not available. New Zealand makes an appealing partner because they have largely contained the virus. But they want nothing to do with bubbling after three new travel-related cases were reported.

Canada’s travel and tourism industries want to bring more countries to the dance floor. In an open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau in the Globe and Mail, they say 14-day quarantines and travel restrictions are “no longer necessary” and are “out of step with other countries across the globe,”

Trudeau objects, saying that lifting travel restrictions now “would lead to a resurgence that might well force us to go back into lockdown.”

Epidemiologists agree with Trudeau. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw, general internist and clinical epidemiologist says: “Travel is the one segment of the economy that probably has the greatest potential to derail our ability to stay out of lockdown.”

The problem is not just being in a metal tube hurtling through the sky with dozens of other passengers, it’s the dangers that await you on landing. “When people travel, they don’t travel to stay indoors with their close travel companion at their arrival destination,” Dr. Lapointe-Shaw said. “Travel does have an outsized effect on the ability of outbreaks to grow quickly.”

When B.C. is stares across the dance floor at potential partners to bubble with, there are Alberta and Washington State.

B.C.’s relations with Alberta are a bit prickly. Last month, travelers with Alberta plates have received nasty notes and had tires slashed. One Alberta traveler had a note attached to his windshield reading: “F-ck off back to Alberta! Supposed to be not doing non-essential travel.” Soon after, he also noticed a large scratch on the side of his car.

The love with Alberta just isn’t there.

Washington State forms a natural geographic area with B.C. It’s part of Cascadia, a loose association of bioregions along the West Coast. While appealing, Washington is off limits as the U.S. spirals into an every-growing deadly pandemic.

It looks like B.C. will have to sit out this dance.

Pandemic exposes failings of long-term care facilities in B.C.

In 2002, the BC Liberals had a grand plan to provide seniors with home-like settings. Added to that, they promised that the new residences would cost the government about half as much. Who wouldn’t want that?

image: WebStockReview

Home-like residences would be financed through public-private partnerships (P3s). Reduced costs to the government would result by attracting private-sector investors to finance new residences.

However, the plan hasn’t worked out that well.

Sure, the government reduced their costs but it was by shutting down existing facilities. Between 2001 and 2004, the government closed 26 long-term care facilities, resulting in the loss of 2,529 long-term care beds according to a report prepared for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called Assisted Living in British Columbia, Trends in access, affordability and ownership.

The fallout of the grand experiment is fewer, unaffordable housing units.

According to Statistics Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the cost of Private-Pay assisted living exceeds the financial resources of seniors with average or low income.

Affordable housing is defined as rent less than 30 per cent of income. While wealthy B.C. senior couples can almost afford rent according to that definition (39 per cent), seniors living alone in a bachelor suite require over 80 per cent of their income for rent, which is clearly unaffordable. At rents that high, seniors will be doing without basic sundries, medications, transportation, and entertainment.

Seniors who can’t find lower cost Publicly Subsidized residences are turning to Private-Pay residences as a last resort, even though they can’t really afford them.

And while the number of Private-Pay and Publicly Subsidized units has increased marginally, it hasn’t kept up with demand. The net new Private-Pay units have only increased by 1,130 in all of B.C. from 2010 to 2017. In the Interior Health region, the net new Private-Pay units only increased by 243.

The number of Publicly Subsidized assisted living units added in the same period is even more dismal -only by 105 for all of B.C. and by 26 for the Interior Health region.

The labels “Private-Pay” and “Publicly Subsidized” are misleading.

Private-Pay suggests that these residences are built independently and rented at market prices, like a hotel. However, the government pays the operator of these facilities a daily resident rate and BC Housing, a crown corporation, pays for housing costs.

Publicly Subsidized is equally misleading. It suggests that the residences are owned and operated by the government. They are not: 63 per cent are owned by a non-profit organization, 33 per cent are owned by a for-profit business, and only 4 per cent are owned by a public health authority. Unlike Private-Pay facilities, renters are subsidized according to their ability to pay.

As the pandemic unfolded, it became apparent that some Private-Pay residences did not meet the legislated standards of care for residents. As a result, health authorities seized control of a number of residences owned by Retirement Concepts, British Columbia’s largest chain of for-profit care homes.

Long-term care facilities in B.C. didn’t meet the needs of most seniors before the COVID-19 pandemic and now the outbreak has focussed a spotlight on those failings.

More Publicly Subsidized residences need to be financed by BC Housing and operated by non-profits and for-profit businesses. The housing may not be grand but when well-designed, they can be comfortable, affordable, safe, and profitable.

Albertans to receive the highest carbon gift

The carbon gift is not a lump of coal. Albertans will receive the highest carbon tax rebate of any of the four provinces who have opted out of the federal plan. A family of four will receive an average tax credit of $888, compared to families in the other holdout provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan who can claim a credit of $448, $486 and $809, respectively.

imge: Pinterest

Let’s call it a gift, not a rebate because most Albertans will receive more back than they pay in the so-called carbon tax. According to calculations by economists Jennifer Winter and Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary, 80 per cent of Alberta households will get more back from the credit than they will pay in increased costs (Globe and Mail, Dec. 19, 2019).

And can we really call it a carbon tax when it isn’t really isn’t? Taxes are collected by governments to pay for health care, roads, education and so on. The goal of the carbon transfer is to reduce fossil fuel consumption, not to collect taxes. Let’s call it a carbon transfer. Money is just collected and redistributed.

The names given to the carbon transfer and carbon gift are politically motivated.  Conservatives prefer to call it a tax because it suits their political agenda of characterizing the fed’s actions to reduce fossil fuel consumption as a tax grab. The feds like calling the carbon gift “climate action incentive payments” because they like to pretend that we will meet carbon reduction targets.

And the federal Liberals are not rewarding Albertans for shutting them out of the province in the last election. The carbon gift is higher there because it covers a longer period of time than the other provinces and because Albertans spend more on fossil fuels.

You might wonder who’s paying for the carbon gift if it’s revenue neutral. Who is paying more than they receive?  It turns out that businesses are.

For struggling businesses, the carbon transfer seems unfair. But the holdout provinces are responsible for that: if they had devised their own carbon transfer system, the one proposed by the feds wouldn’t be in place. All provinces are free to create their own systems. Presumably, they could devise a system where taxpayers end up giving a carbon gift to small businesses. By refusing to create their own plan, they are accepting the fed’s by default.

B.C.’s carbon transfer is a model for the rest of Canada to follow. Businesses are not hurt –in fact they receive a reduction in taxes, as do personal taxpayers. Introduced in 2008, it has reduced per-capita emissions by 12 per cent and contrary to what conservatives claim, it hasn’t hurt the economy.

B.C.’ carbon transfer is also a model for conservatives because it was introduced by the BC Liberals, a conservative government. If the BC Liberals could introduce a carbon transfer and get re-elected, any conservative government could.

Pricing carbon is an easy sell to voters because most Canadians agree on pricing pollution, led by BC (84%) and trailing in Alberta where it’s still a majority (69%). And if there is no net cost to taxpayers, what’s not to like?

Alberta’s faulty pipeline gambit

The Alberta government says that if only B.C. would allow a second pipeline to be built, our gasoline prices would go down.

If only it were true.

The new pipeline will not supply more gasoline to B.C. and it will not reduce our gasoline prices. The reason is hardly a surprise -the new pipeline will carry crude oil, not gasoline.  A report uncovered by reporter Justine Hunter confirms that.

The report was commissioned by Trans Mountain with the hope that it would demonstrate the need for a new pipeline. To no one’s surprise, that’s what they found.  The consulting firm Muse, Stancil & Co. says:

“The startup of [the Trans Mountain expansion] project will act to increase the price of crude oil at Edmonton because roughly 79,500 [cubic metres a day] of crude oil is diverted from the existing North American markets to Northeast Asia (Globe and Mail, May 6, 2019).”

In other words, what B.C. needs is not what the pipeline will deliver. It will send crude oil to overseas markets. It will not send crude oil to be refined into gasoline in B.C.

Even if the second pipeline delivered crude to be refined into gasoline, that wouldn’t happen because our refineries are running full-tilt. They couldn’t produce any more gas even if they wanted to.

For sure, B.C. would be hurt if Alberta were to cut off the existing pipeline. Alberta supplies 80 percent of fuel burned in B.C.

Dan McTeague, senior petroleum analyst for gasbuddy.com, says the only way gas prices could go down if the existing pipeline carried more fuel:

“The new pipeline would be entirely devoted to heavy oil, but the existing pipeline would be expanded by 50,000 barrels per day.”

More supply would reduce prices in a marketplace that was properly functioning.  However, there is some doubt about the marketplace according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. They claim that price-gouging is driving up prices. Their report reveals that of the 55 cent per litre increase since 2016, only 6.3 cents is a result of increased taxes while profit margins have increased by 18 cents.

Another group confirms that finding. Navius Research reports that since 2008, refinery margins in Metro Vancouver increased to 35 per cent while the increase was less than 18 per cent in the rest of the country. They say that margins “have decoupled from supply costs, resulting in prices that cannot be attributed to competitive market forces or scarcity of supply.”

While there is no hard evidence of price-fixing by the four companies that supply the Lower Mainland, Premier Horgan has asked the B.C. Utilities Commission to investigate the record-breaking gas prices. It will be interesting to hear what they find.

The BC Liberals see political hay to be made. They have erected huge billboards with a picture of Premier Horgan and the words, “Blame John Horgan.” BC Liberal leader Wilkinson says that Horgan has failed to cap gas taxes.

I have to smile at Wilkinson’s claim, not just because taxes aren’t the problem but because it was the BC Liberals who introduced the carbon tax in the first place.

 

 

Canadians support carbon pricing

Canadians, including business groups, support Trudeau’s proposed carbon-pricing plan announced Tuesday. So why are some politicians opposed? The short answer is politics, although games are being played by both sides.

image: Werner Antweiler

Recent polling from Environics Research shows that nine out of ten Canadians are concerned about climate change. And a majority support carbon pricing except in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tony Coulson from Environics Research says:

“For many Canadians, it appears their concern about the consequences of climate change is strong enough that they’re willing to bear some cost to help stop it (Globe and Mail October 16, 2108).”

The feds say that they will collect carbon taxes from those provinces that don’t have a carbon-pricing plan and return the money directly to citizens of those provinces. Depending on how little fossils fuels they burn, they could get more back in rebates than they spend on the added carbon tax.

Opposition parties are calling it a vote-buying tactic in time for the next election.

Those opposing carbon pricing include Ontario Premier Ford. During his Alberta visit to bolster Jason Kenney, leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, Ford tweeted:

“I am proud to say that Ontario will stand with Albertans who oppose this unfair and burdensome tax on families and businesses.”

The Ontario Premier has allied himself with Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe in opposing the federal tax plan. Manitoba also recently cancelled its planned carbon tax.

Carbon taxes are directly on the sources of carbon: 70 per cent of them from burning fossil fuels to heat our homes, generate electricity and for transportation.

Ford claims that carbon taxes take money out of the pockets of taxpayers. Not necessarily. A revenue neutral carbon tax such as the one that B.C. has doesn’t. Sure, we pay more for gasoline but receive an equal reduction in taxes elsewhere. As demonstrated in B.C., carbon pricing reduces greenhouse gases and doesn’t harm the economy.

If Ford wanted to take a conservative approach, it would be our carbon tax. A progressive approach would be to take the carbon taxes and directly invest them into sources of renewable energy.

Canadian businesses also support carbon pricing. The business-backed C.D. Howe Institute has recently come out in favour of carbon-pricing. The institute understands both the necessity and practicality of carbon taxes. C.D. Howe policy analyst Tracy Snoddon says:

“The politics of carbon pricing may have changed but the climate change challenge and Canada’s emissions reduction targets under the Paris agreement have not. The economics are also unchanged – carbon pricing continues to be the most cost-effective option for achieving emissions reductions across the country (Globe and Mail October 18, 2108).”

It’s disappointing to see politicians use the future of our planet as a political football.

Canadians want government action. For the first time in polling history, Canadians say that individual action is not working that governments need to step in.  “A slim majority now feels that voluntary action is not enough to address the challenges we face,” says Coulson.

Canadians are waking up to the fact that individual actions, like changing to energy efficient light bulbs, is not working. Only legislated policies will collectively accomplish what we individually wish for.