Stephane Dion’s Much Ado About Carbon

If the quote-unquote party insiders that have been talking to the Globe and Mail are to be believed, then tomorrow’s announcement by Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion will almost certainly confirm that the NDP is going to rival its 1984 record seat count and the Conservatives are heading for a nice, cushy majority government soon. Think of it this way, the carbon “shift” won’t tax gas users, tax low-income Canadians or tax Canadians who depend on fuel for their livelihood (something Big Oil TM can argue a strong case about, by the way!). Consider as well that Dion is going out of his way to assure us that the tax cuts (a measly 10%, max, when you consider how this is going to hurt our economy) that he is proposing to offset the carbon tax are going to monitored for their parity day and night.

What we have after all those caveats is a shift that won’t do an iota to change the habits of Canadians, if the goal is still, in fact, to save ourselves from the sixth element of the periodic table. The fact that Dion is trying to convince us that life will go on normally also demonstrates that the professor didn’t take much chemistry in his undergrad as even the only item that doesn’t require carbon for production, computer software, still requires a bunch of energy that comes from carbon just to run the computers that make the programs. How is this not going to affect us?

Then, of course, we must consider what corporations are going to do. Being nobody’s fool, any industry that pollutes like the steel factories in Hamilton, the auto plants in the GTA or the oil refineries in Alberta, will just find a way to slip their sites south of the border where the environmental lunacy currently hasn’t hit the same heights. Under Stephane Dion’s loophole-ridden Canada, we sell our oil assets to the States, sacrifice jobs that would’ve been created to refine the black gold, then buy it back at a loss for our vehicles that aren’t going anywhere because of said lack of jobs.

So, with that all considered, can we really count on the Liberals to actually follow through with anything? Well, they’re still proposing a tax aren’t they? And since I just spent three paragraphs explaining the glories of this plan, and that your average Canadian voter stops reading after “insiders”, I’d say that Stephane Dion will successfully reduce our carbon pollution by putting the massive CO2 emitters currently in the Liberal caucus out on the street, and ensuring that their successors won’t be blowing so much hot air about a plan too gentle for environmentalists, too harmful for conservatives and too complex for a national party to win voters over on!