Trudeau accused of lacking leadership after refusing to meet with premiers about carbon tax

Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the prime minister’s answer ‘snarky.’

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refusal to meet with five Canadian premiers, who have demanded a meeting with him to discuss the ever-escalating carbon tax that shot up 23 percent on April 1, shows he lacks any true “leadership,” quipped Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe.

Last Thursday during an interview with the CBC’s Matt Galloway for an episode that aired-on April 4, Trudeau said he already “had” a meeting with the premiers in 2016 and will “continue to talk with premiers” about the carbon tax but will not meet with them soon.

Moe said Trudeau’s refusal to meet with the premiers is “not leadership.”

“Premiers have respectfully asked the Prime Minister for a meeting to discuss the carbon tax. Here is the snarky answer that we got,” Moe wrote Monday on X, with a link to a CBC report regarding Trudeau dismissing a full-out meeting with the premiers.

“That’s not leadership,” he added.

Shortly after the Trudeau government raised the carbon tax by 23 percent on April 1, the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and New Brunswick all wrote letters to Trudeau asking him to convene an emergency first ministers meeting, to discuss the carbon tax’s detrimental effect on Canadians finances.

The first premier to write to Trudeau was Newfoundland and Labrador’s Andrew Furey, who wrote to him before April 1 demanding a meeting.

Last Thursday, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in her letter to Trudeau wrote, “Albertans and Canadians are facing a cost-of-living crisis not seen in decades.”

“In March, natural gas was selling at less than $1.80 a gigajoule. Now that the carbon tax has increased to $4.09 per gigajoule, the tax alone is more than double what it costs Albertans to heat their homes. This is not just reckless, it is immoral and inhumane,” she wrote.

Last Friday at a press conference, Ford said, “Taxing people doesn’t reduce emissions, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re hurting the economy. They’re hurting people. Unacceptable.”

Protests against Trudeau have been increasing in recent months due to the unpopularity of higher carbon taxes as well as other governmental policies.

LifeSiteNews reported last week that protesters let Trudeau know their true feelings about his tanking in the polls by heckling him with loud drum beats and screams during a press conference.

On April 1, Canada’s carbon tax, which was introduced by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019, increased from $65 to $85 per tonne despite seven of 10 provincial premiers objecting to the increase and 70% of Canadians saying they are against it.

Trudeau has remained adamant that he will not pause the hikes.

As it stands, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $65 per tonne, but the Trudeau government wants to increase this to $170 per tonne by 2030.

Recent polls show that the scandal-plagued government has sent the Liberals into a nosedive with no end in sight. Per a recent LifeSiteNews report, according to polls, in a Canadian federal election held today, Conservatives under leader Pierre Poilievre would win a majority in the House of Commons over Trudeau’s Liberals.

Trudeau’s government is trying to force net-zero regulations on all Canadian provinces, notably on electricity generation, as early as 2035. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are adamantly opposed to Trudeau’s 2035 goals.

The Trudeau government’s current environmental goals, which are in lockstep with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades.

The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet are involved.

Related Topics:#AnthonyMurdoch #CarbonTaxPremiers #DougFord #JustinTrudeau #LifeSiteNews #ScottMoe

Up Next

Advocacy group urges change to recall and citizen initiated referendum legislation

Don't Miss

Canadian police launch investigation into alleged Chinese meddling 3 years after 2021 election

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

US Reportedly Weighing Military Strikes On Narco Targets Inside Venezuela

Business / 6 hours ago

Bank of Canada governor warns citizens to anticipate lower standard of living

Media / 17 hours ago

Carney speech highlights how easily newsrooms are played by politicians

Business

Bank of Canada governor warns citizens to anticipate lower standard of living

Published on November 1, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

“Unless something changes, our incomes will be lower than they otherwise would be.”

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem gave a grim assessment of the state of the economy, essentially telling Canadians that they should accept a “lower” standard of living.

In an update on Wednesday in which he also lowered Canada’s interest rate to 2.25 percent, Macklem gave the bleak news, which no doubt will hit Canadian families hard.

“What’s most concerning is, unless we change some other things, our standard of living as a country, as Canadians, is going to be lower than it otherwise would have been,” Macklem told reporters.

“Unless something changes, our incomes will be lower than they otherwise would be.”

Macklem said what Canada is going through “is not just a cyclical downturn.”

Asked what he meant by a “cyclical downturn,” Macklem blamed what he said were protectionist measures the United States has put in place such as tariffs, which have made everything more expensive.

“Part of it is structural,” he said, adding, “The U.S. has swerved towards protectionism.”

“It is harder to do business with the United States. That has destroyed some of the capacity in this country. It’s also adding costs.”

Macklem stopped short of saying out loud that a recession is all but inevitable but did say growth is “pretty close to zero” at the moment.

Canadian taxpayers are already dealing with high inflation and high taxes, in part due to the Liberal government overspending and excessive money printing, and even admitting that giving money to Ukraine comes at the “taxpayers’” expense.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Carney boldly proclaimed earlier this week that his Liberal government’s upcoming 2025 budget will include millions more in taxpayer money for “SLGBTQI+ communities” and “gender” equality and “pride” safety.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) recently blasted the Carney government for spending $13 million on promotional merchandise such as “climate change card games,” “laser pens and flying saucers,” and “Bamboo toothbrushes” since 2022.

Canadians pay some of the highest income and other taxes in the world. As reported by LifeSiteNews, Canadian families spend, on average, 42 percent of their income on taxes, more than food and shelter costs. Inflation in Canada is at a high not seen in decades.

Business

Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss

There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.

The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.

It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.

The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.

Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.

And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.

Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.

Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.

A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.

These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.

As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.