The chickens are coming home to roost for the Trudeau government.
Last month (August 6th) Nanos Research released a new poll showing that two thirds of Canadians think that now is a bad time to increase the Carbon Tax. This is not exactly a shocking revelation. It really didn’t take a poll to determine what everyday Canadians already know. Adding a Carbon Tax to a struggling economy is a bad idea.
Anyone who has gone to the grocery store lately, or has filled up their vehicle, knows that the cost of living has skyrocketed. Social media is flooded with Canadians sharing their stories of how they are at the breaking point with the cost of living. It doesn’t take an economist to know that higher consumption taxes have the immediate effect of increasing the cost of everything. That has not stopped the green Agenda driven Trudeau government that seems determined to make life unaffordable for Canadians.
But back to that Nanos poll –
Let’s break this down a bit more to understand what this poll is really saying about how Canadians feel about Carbon Taxes.
First, it is evident that Nanos is approaching this poll with a clear bias in favor of Carbon Taxes. Participants were asked three (3) questions: 1) Do you think a carbon tax on things like gas is an effective, somewhat effective, somewhat ineffective, or ineffective way to encourage people to use less fuel? 2) Is now a very good, good, average, poor or very poor time to increase carbon taxes on things like gas? 3) On a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is not at all effective and 10 is extremely effective, how effective do you think the federal government’s Carbon Pollution Pricing system, often called the carbon tax, is to combat climate change?
Notice the poll did not ask Canadians whether or not they think Carbon Taxes are a good idea or whether they want them at all.
The assumption is that Canadians buy into the narrative that climate change is real, and a “real problem” that requires government action, that “using less carbon” such as fuel is a key, if not the key, to reducing “carbon consumption”.
We know not every Canadian believes this; but the Nanos poll didn’t even ask.
That said, looking at the results of what they did ask, two thirds of Canadians say that now is a bad time to increase carbon taxes.
In the prairie provinces, this number was 79% and in Atlantic Canada 73% of respondents said the timing is “poor” or “very poor”.
Of even greater political significance: in Ontario, where the next federal election will likely be decided, a whopping 68.7% of respondents said that now is a bad time to increase the Carbon Tax. And yet Justin Trudeau keeps increasing this most hated tax.
In terms of effectiveness, 64.3% in Ontario think that a new carbon tax is not effective at encouraging people to use less fuel. This comes as no surprise. A majority of Canadians rely on their vehicles to get to work, the grocery store, kids practices, and family vacations. Normal daily activities for life in Canada. In most cases not driving is not an option. It only means that getting there is more expensive, and other items in the budget need to be sacrificed instead.
And as we know the Carbon Tax is one of the culprits for higher prices.
Conservative MP Kyle Seeback articulated it well in the House of Commons when he explained to Trudeau’s Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault how the Carbon Tax is driving up inflation. “Mr. Speaker, it is incredible, he actually does not know how food ends up on his plate. The farmer pays a carbon tax, the truck that picks up the farmer’s food pays a carbon tax to take it to the processor, the processor pays a carbon tax, the truck that picks it up from the processor to take it to the grocery store pays a carbon tax, the grocery store pays a carbon tax and then Canadians cannot pay for food.”
Canadians for Affordable Energy has been advocating for affordability since 2017 and have known that Carbon Taxes are a threat to affordable energy in Canada and will drive up the cost of everything. And that is exactly what is happening. Fuel prices are skyrocketing, food prices are at record highs, and Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. Energy affordability is the key to success in Canada and therefore it is the view of CAE that there is never a good time to implement a Carbon Tax. Full stop.
Canadians are finally starting to connect the dots on a path that leads directly back to bad energy and environmental policies. Policies that have stifled our resource economy and punished working Canadians. Policies that are hitting Canadians’ pocketbooks really hard, especially when trying to fill up their vehicles and feed their families. Policies that won’t even help the environment.
Pierre Poilievre and his Conservative government have committed to scrapping the carbon tax. Let’s hope they follow through on this promise if they come into power in the next election. Because not all Canadians buy the narrative that Carbon Taxes are a good thing.
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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.
Written By 
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
