rileyracing1

We as Canadian are so stupid and Naive for voting the Liberals into power in the first place and we deserved what we got .....

And the budget will balance itself ..... Who believed that crap ... and Canadians on the whole still voted that inexperienced studdering moron in anyway... Good on us ....

Porsches

No I have not.

wc11

Don't forget, "the economy will grow from the heart outwards".....
Oh wait, a recession is creeping ever so closer.

theiceman

well ... you guys did vote in a drama teacher ... what exactly did you expect ?

Porsches

I thought Imo000 was the drama teacher!

ronnie993tt

Quite right Will. As retired Senior Economist for Industry Canada I can confirm that climate change was invented in the early '90's to rationalize picking our pockets and is not based on any validated science. At best they're flawed and at worst they're fraud.

Porsches

I actually met a man at an airport in Europe a few years ago as he was on the way to another UN conference on climate and he is a retired Canadian scientist who was trying to get people to realize that the world is getting and will continue to get colder and that global warming is a scam. He used sunspots as his argument and proof. I'm not a scientist - so I asked him about front plates, and he said they we potentially the cause of all the earths climate issues.

Ronan

I think that looking at this tax in isolation is not helpful. The ever growing tax burden and the endless growth of all levels of government has not achieved anything except for making us uncompetitive. Like it or not we live right beside the US and capital is highly mobile.

If if I felt we were getting value from all of these taxes then I would be ok. In the end I see endless inefficiency and a grab for all revenue with new taxes every year.

We appear to have little interest in entrepreneurship. This is why so many startups go south. We educate people well and then lose the benefit.

For example, doctors. Software entrepreneurs and so on. We hear of the successes now and then but most of the reality is that we lose many of the best. I have no respect for this naive and impractical government. When Paul Martin was running Finance I was an enthusiastic Liberal.

The crowd in today are spending our future and when a recession comes (as it will) they will blame the recession instead of their earlier profligacy.

Imo000

You don't own a snowmobile do you?

997turbocab

I have friends that went snowmobiling last week...

Nate Tempest

I appreciate your reasonableness too. Certainly industry of all sorts is a larger issue than personal vehicles, definitely including large ships. (Although from a bit of research, while large ships can obviously pollute much more than cars, the scale doesn't appear to be off by nearly that much.) But yes, that absolutely needs to be addressed as well. Ideally with countries like Canada taking the lead, we'll see more international cooperation.

To respond to a couple points made by others: while things like the ozone layer deteriorating were serious problems, they were also much easier problems to solve than climate change. We knew that ozone loss was caused by CFCs, and while they were useful, they were much less ubiquitous than sources of CO2 (everything), and they were relatively easily replaced. Climate change (or global warming if you prefer) is a much more difficult problem to solve. And we know it's happening—we're not just guessing based on annual temperature trends, although those are going up. We can measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and we know the effects of CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) on the passage of energy: Basically they let through more of the types of energy radiated from the sun than they do the heat energy radiated from the Earth—so temperature needs to rise until it's high enough to put off enough heat to reach a new equilibrium. That's why even if we stopped adding any new CO2 to the atmosphere now, temperature would keep rising for a number of years, until that new equilibrium is reached.

Often this issue is framed as if we're just guessing what's going to happen and we could be wrong, but the actual "greenhouse effect" is well understood, and has been measured both in the lab and in the atmosphere. The only thing we don't know is exactly how bad things will be if we do get multiple degrees of warming. But the realistic possibilities range from really bad to worse. In order to avoid that, we need to drastically decrease greenhouse gas emissions—in fact, at this point to avoid 2+ degrees of warming we would need to go negative, so we would need to find cost-effective ways to actually remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than we put in.

There is one other possible last resort, which is some form of geo-engineering, such as spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to block more of the sun's energy—so the greenhouse gasses would still cause the Earth to release less heat for a given temperature, but the sulfur dioxide would block more energy from entering in the first place. However, these options have both many logistical challenges and many negative side effects, both known and presumably unknown. Plus they're just stopgaps; we would still eventually need to get the CO2 under control, but they would buy time. Personally I expect something like that is what we'll end up with, since I can't see the world getting its act together soon enough in any other way, and eventually things will get bad enough that we won't have a choice. But at the very least, everything we do now to mitigate emissions will reduce the severity of the intervention required.

It's not reasonable to ask individual people to act against their own interests for the infinitesimal impact they can individually have on climate change, so we need governments to act. Anything they do is going to have costs, but from everything I've seen, a carbon tax is one of the most efficient ways to go—it's minimally interventionist, and when it's designed to be revenue neutral the net negative effect on the economy should be mitigated. (Although it certainly will have a significant impact on some industries; that's inevitable if you need to significantly change behaviour. And I recognize that's easier to say as someone who isn't being significantly affected. But from everything I can see, it's necessary.)

Imo000

Have THEY noticed anything?

Muskoka

Yup. We can snowmobile in April, and there was a scientist in an airport talking about global warming is a scam. Climate change must not be real...

wc11

There once was an ice age.(actually more than once) It melted.

997turbocab

Snow?