The federal New Democrats backed Conservative demands Wednesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take part in a televised “emergency meeting” on carbon pricing with Canada’s premiers.
The federal carbon price is not the “be-all, end-all” of climate policy, and New Democrats are open to alternative plans presented by premiers, NDP environment critic Laurel Collins said Wednesday.
Everyone: “Hey NDP, if you want to actually win a general election you need to be pragmatic about your talking points and messaging and not just alienate people with academic talk.”
NDP: “Best I can do is attack the only effective policy we have for fighting climate change to try and split the left vote.”
The NDP supporting the Conservatives’ plan of “nothing” is a fucking cowardly embarrassment. Yes your job is to listen, and you can do that by reading their written submissions for comprehensive action to reduce their emissions in accordance with targets.
You do not figure that out in a “meeting”, you figure that out through weeks of sober impact assessment and planning. This is political farce that is threatening to doom our future for fucking domestic politics.
The federal carbon price is not the “be-all, end-all” of climate policy, and New Democrats are open to alternative plans presented by premiers, NDP environment critic Laurel Collins said Wednesday.
The provinces have had literally years to come up with their own solution. They are free to create their own solution right now. The federal carbon tax is merely a back stop for provinces that don’t have their own solution. This is all pure politics that doesn’t help anyone…
Archived link, as microsoft tracks people across one-third of the web: https://web.archive.org/web/20240411185223/https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/ndp-says-carbon-price-is-not-be-all-end-all-of-climate-policy-backs-tory-motion/ar-BB1lpwVO
I thought this was so embarrassing on the part of the NDP that I think I wrote an MP for the first time in my relatively young life:
In backing the PC motion versus abstaining and saying “we need to talk about the forest versus a singular tree” and presenting a comprehensive plan, the NDP abdicated the position of being the responsible and scientifically-backed party in the room. Why get in-between the PCs making political hay (they obviously don’t care about climate change) and the Libs’ inept messaging around their policy?
The world is shifting to the right and this party seems to be too, which I don’t think is a winning move for it. Being a better and more progressive option than the liberals, not a slightly different substitute, is the best way for the NDP to remain relevant (and honour its roots). Canada’s better with a strong and principled NDP, and I’m concerned those days might be numbered. I’ve voted NDP in most/all elections, and the more politicizing crap like this I see the more inclined I am to consider other options like the Greens. Be wary of alienating younger voters for whom incompetence in addressing the climate crisis equals political irrelevance
Props to writing to your MP. I rarely get a response when I write to mine, but I’d like to believe my comments are tallied somewhere.
Why does this necessitate being a televised event? Sounds like this is just going to be a set-up to dunk on climate policy for sound bites without accomplishing anything meaningful.
And in a televised event, Poilievre is going to clean up. The NDP’s worst case scenario for this motion is that the Liberals fall for it.
That’s a massive blunder. There is about 0 chance the Cons are serious about finding “alternative plans” for climate policy. If they were, they wouldn’t be asking the likes of Danielle “blanket ban on renewables” Smith and Doug “let’s just develop the greenbelt” Ford for their ideas. Furthermore, if they think this tax is too much of an imposition on Canadians, then that rules out essentially all other forms of climate action, because the tax is one of the most conservative policies possible.
I’m not saying the carbon tax is perfect by any means, but up to the present, nobody opposed to it has been able to come up with a better idea, or even much of a coherent argument against it. I don’t know what the NDP are gaining from this deal, but I can’t see it being worth all the trust and credibility they had to concede.
Their ploy could be to let the Conservatives show that they have zero alternative ideas, and then present their own alternatives that just aren’t called a Carbon tax.
