By Dan McTeague

That light at the end of the tunnel we thought was an oncoming train? It might be the sun after all!

“Tis the season to be jolly,” says the song, and commonsense-loving Canadians would do well to follow that dictum this Christmas season.

To be sure, Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power have harmed our country and its people immeasurably. Trudeau has waged a multi-front war on both the production and consumption of hydrocarbon energy, the backbone of the Canadian economy.

The Trudeau government, devoted as it is to the damaging Net Zero ideology, instituted a Carbon Tax, appropriately set to increase every year on April Fool’s Day, of all days, so that Canadians would get progressively acclimated to paying more for energy every year. Like frogs in a slowly heating pot.

He was so devoted to this increase that he refused to postpone it during the dark early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when no one knew what was going on, unemployment was rising sharply, and the country was looking at a severe economic downturn. That’s ideology for you.

The Carbon Tax, compounded as it is by the less-known Clean Fuel Standard, which I’ve dubbed the Second Carbon Tax, has been an albatross around the neck of the Canadian economy, making it difficult for us to keep our heads above water. It has made it increasingly more expensive to heat our homes in a famously frigid climate, and to gas up our cars in a huge country where driving is a necessity.

Those are its obvious consequences, but somewhat less commented on has been its secondary effects on the price of goods and services. The Carbon Tax raises the cost of business at every step of our supply chain, from the farm to the grocery store, and that cost is ultimately passed onto the consumer.

And then there are the Electric Vehicle (EV) mandates, which will become an issue much sooner than you realize. The Trudeau government has mandated that by 2035, in just about a decade, every new car, SUV, or light truck sold in Canada must be an EV. This despite the fact that EVs are less reliable — once again, especially in the cold.

Charging EVs is extremely inconvenient, generally taking hours. And that’s if you can even find a charger — Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need to build about 450,000 charging stations to meet the needs of the country, if Trudeau’s EV transition is going to work at all. Right now we have about 28,000.

They’re also expensive to produce, which is why the Trudeau government (along with their partners in crime, the Ford government in Ontario) have been heavily subsidizing their production. And they’re expensive to buy, which is why the government has been subsidizing their purchase. Which is to say, billions of taxpayer dollars are being shoveled into both ends of the EV dumpster fire!

And one of the most recent outrages perpetrated by this government has been the emission cap, which as I said in these pages a few months ago, “make Canada the only country in the world which willingly and purposefully stifles its single largest revenue stream.”

After all, a report commissioned by the Government of Alberta found that an Emissions Cap would lead to a 10% decrease in Alberta’s oil production and a 16% decrease in conventional natural gas production. The report estimates that “over the 2030 to 2040 period… real GDP in Alberta is $191 billion lower and real GDP in the Rest of Canada is $91 billion lower, compared to the baseline scenario.” Instead of growing, the economies of Alberta and Canada will have contracted by 2040, by 4.5% of GDP for the former and by 1.0% of GDP of the latter.

And if that is too abstract, it just means that working men and women, throughout our country, not just in our western provinces, will struggle to provide for their families, whether or not their professions have anything to do with oil and gas. That’s what a shrinking economy looks like.

Now, I could go on and on this way, touching on housing, crime, or rising unemployment, but a truly exhaustive list of Trudeaupian blunders might take us all the way to Easter. But I did open this article by counseling us all to rejoice, in the proper spirit of this season. And, despite this bleak picture, there is good reason to do so.

First off, rejoice because the results of Trudeau’s catastrophic governance have been noticed. Regular people have soured on his policies, particularly the supposedly “green” ones. Hammering away at the Carbon Tax has put Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a pretty good position to win the federal election we’re set to have on or before (preferably before) October 20, 2025. At which point we can begin the process of doing a significant course correction and putting the past 9 years behind us.

That is easier said than done. It will take a lot of hard work on the part of the Conservatives to undo the ideological policies which have made our lives unaffordable, and there will be the temptation to go after the low hanging fruit by, say, canceling the Carbon Tax and leaving the rest of the rotten Net Zero superstructure in place.

That would be bad, and if they try anything along those lines, I will be the first to call them on it. Even so, they are unlikely to actively make things worse, which makes them better than the Trudeau Liberals.

But more importantly, we should rejoice because politics isn’t everything. That’s easy to forget when we’re throwing elbows on Twitter/X and elsewhere, but there’s more to life than this. With all of our problems, we’re still blessed to live in a beautiful, peaceful country with abundant natural resources and full of good people.

So my advice to you, dear reader, is to make it a point during these holidays to spend some time with family and catch up with some old friends, whatever their political persuasion.

You won’t regret it.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.