Carbon tax doomed under Poilievre Conservatives: MLA Hunter

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Sunny South News

By Trevor Busch
Sunny South News
editor@tabertimes.com

With pundits and political analysts alike predicting electoral disaster for the federal Liberals in any upcoming election, many have now began speculating on what a federal government under Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives might look like.

First and foremost, Hunter argues, the federal carbon tax would be eliminated.  

“A Poilievre government would be the end of the carbon tax. The carbon tax is coming undone. Even the NDP are now saying that they would get rid of it if it wasn’t mandated by the federal Liberals. They have now come full circle. Jagmeet Singh is now saying that he wants to get rid of the carbon tax because it doesn’t work for the common man and family. Well, we’ve been saying that as conservatives from the beginning. So this would be, in my opinion, the best thing that could happen. I know Australia went with a carbon tax, and they got rid of it, and they brought it back with another Liberal government there. If you had every country in the world having a fair playing field where they all had a carbon tax, then maybe that would be something that could work, other than the fact that it’s an inflationary thing. It causes the cost of everything to go up, especially in Alberta here, because everything is shipped, but it isn’t in the United States. And so we have a completely terrible disadvantage when we have a carbon tax and they don’t. It does not help us whatsoever, especially with us being such an export province – we export so much, and we have to take those export prices, because we’re price takers, not price makers when it comes to international commodities. If all we did was got rid of the carbon tax, that would be reason enough to have Poilievre.”

Proposed projects like the former Energy East pipeline might stand a good chance of being revived under the federal Conservatives if industry is on board, says Hunter.

“I think he would be very willing to do that. We certainly know that oil and gas is going to be around for as long as I’m living, there’s lots of life left we just need to make sure that we have the tools needed to be able to get the product where it needs to go. We shouldn’t be importing from dictator states. We have plenty of oil in Canada.”

Although there have been recent signals the Liberals’ erstwhile allies in the current minority Parliament are looking to play hardball with Justin Trudeau in exchange for propping up his government, Hunter isn’t overly optimistic Canadians will be heading to the polls this fall.   

“I think that this is just the party’s last breaths of life, because they’re going to get completely – in my opinion – decimated in the next election,” said Hunter. “But I don’t think that there’s going to be a fall election. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The Bloc will prop them up, and that’s all they need.”

Developments in Ottawa earlier this month suggest Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet might now be ready to topple Trudeau’s Liberals if the government is unwilling to yield on a demand to significantly boost Old Age Security payouts for seniors by Oct. 29.

Hunter points out that fanning the flames of regionalism and using the divide-and-conquer approach to politics might be a way to cling to power, but it isn’t the way to effectively govern a nation.

“We have a Confederation and the Liberals are supposed to be a Canadian party. It’s supposed to be about what’s best for Canada, not just what’s best for one region. They’re pitting one region against the other. We’ve seen that so many times out of Trudeau and his group, just stick it to Albertans. Albertans are so tired of it. Well, are we not a valued member of Confederation? We certainly pay into it quite well. We pay over and above. You know what our population per capita amounts would be, and yet we just seem to be stepped on on a regular basis.”