It was as if the internet — the most democratizing, weird, wonderful, frightening and important technological development in communications since the printing press — had never been invented.
Earlier this month, halfway through answering a question from the House of Commons Industry committee, Annette Verschusen abruptly removed her headphones, stood up, unplugged, and walked out.
It was shocking.
And yet, in a rascally sort of way, I admired it. Yes, yes, the former head of Home Depot Canada and the chancellor of Cape Breton University recently had to resign as chair of Sustainable Development Technology Canada and is under investigation by the Ethics Commissioner for approving hundreds of thousands of dollars in Green Fund grants to her own company, NRStor Inc. But still, who among us hasn’t fantasized about acting out in similar fashion when the blinding light of revelation strikes and it suddenly dawns on you: “WTF am I even doing here? I don’t need this shit.”
And, in your fantasy, you just get up and leave. Like Verschusen did.
I confess I once harboured a similar impulse towards the end of an arduous Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearing along the lines of the three-week-long epic that concluded Dec. 8.
Part of my despair was likely due to being tired. Everyone who appears before a CRTC panel (I was a Commissioner for a decade) deserves one’s full attention and there are thousands of pages of required reading in the weeks leading up to and in the evenings during a hearing.
Then there’s the hearing room. Seemingly designed by Dante Alighieri to sap the will to live from those condemned to work within it, the room’s about the size of an elementary school gym. There are no windows or art and the ambiance complements the soulless mid-century Soviet architectural style of Gatineau’s public buildings.
But — and I hesitate to confess this — it was the relentless rent-seeking that made my mind wander during breaks and impishly imagine what would happen if I just unplugged my laptop, got up, walked out through the crowds, got a cab straight to the airport and never came back. Because eventually, most CRTC hearings devolve into two broad categories. One is a series of presentations from large, protected and profitable companies explaining the dire consequences if they don’t get their way. The other is a seemingly endless parade of well-meaning groups begging for the large companies’ money lest their roles as cultural saviours are diminished. It’s predictably tiresome, tedious and exhausting. But the stakeholders know that commissioners come and go on a regular basis, so no cause to worry about them getting wise to the game.
I was reminded of that inappropriate thought while monitoring the final week of this most recent hearing. When I wasn’t watching, I was reading transcripts and experiencing it all in a mildly PTSDish sort of way.
This hearing was the first of three scheduled to implement the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) which amended the Broadcasting Act for the first time since 1991 in order to “modernize” it by — absurdly, in my view — defining the internet as broadcasting and putting it lock, stock and barrel under the authority of the CRTC, which was first formed in 1968 to make sure Anne Murray and Terry Jacks got fair play on the radio airwaves.
This first phase — in which offshore streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ made their regulatory debut — was supposed to be about three things:
Defining the cutoff line — $10 million, $25 million or $50 million in annual revenue — the CRTC would use to study which companies must buck up and fund Canadian content;
Deciding how much those companies would have to pay;
Determining how many different funds should get the loot and how many groups would be involved — BIPOC, Indigenous, LGBTQ2S, etc.
It wasn’t the debilitating boredom of it all that was the most difficult to overcome. Nor was it the acronym-laden banter between the panel and stakeholders that rendered the discourse incomprehensible to ordinary Canadians. And while the manner in which consumers’ interests were disregarded was beyond frustrating, that wasn’t the worst part.
The seriously soul-crushing aspect was that this hearing looked, sounded and felt exactly like CRTC broadcasting hearings have looked, sounded and felt for 30 years.
It was as if the internet — the most democratizing, weird, wonderful, frightening and important technological development in communications since the printing press — had never been invented.
It was a funereal procession of grim-faced presenters from large, often outrageously profitable domestic companies involved in providing telephone, mobile, internet, cable and broadcasting crying woe are we, declaring the industry to be in “crisis,” demanding “urgent” relief from their regulatory burdens and threatening the jobs of thousands of workers should they not get their way. They even got the ball rolling on a whole new fund for local news production lest democracy die. Because, without them, of course it will.
This was followed by a chorus line of vested interests explaining how important it is for the regulator to ensure lotsa cash flows in their direction lest the nation’s creative aesthetic dies under the jackboot of American cultural imperialism. And — OMG! — whatever happens don’t make me have to move to Hollywood. You know, like poor old Ryan Reynolds did.
There were, to be fair, bright parts when the companies and workers that have built success on the internet politely explained, with respect, that what the CRTC was talking about makes no sense in 2023. None whatsoever. Some even begged the panel of Commissioners to please “do no harm.”
Welcome as something — anything — “modern” was during what otherwise was a bad acid flashback to decades past, it was not enough to revive any sense of optimism. At least not until YouTuber J.J. McCullough — the penultimate presenter — showed up.
In words everyone can understand, he said that we are in “a time when there’s a huge thriving sort of forward‑looking modern youthful wing of the Canadian cultural economy and cultural space in the form of online content creators who are often very entrepreneurial, very self‑directed people that have started from very little and have become very successful.”
And that there is concern with “the idea that those people are perhaps in some way like a problem that now needs to be solved in order to sort of subsidize people that, you know, god bless them, are sort of clinging to perhaps a dream of success in a medium that there just isn’t market or public demand for any more.”
It offered a small flicker of hope that, somehow, the 21st century and all its possibilities might yet survive the CRTC’s smothering embrace.
Then again, as the saying goes, it’s the hope that kills you.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
