Trudeau blasts NDP for ‘totally caving’ on carbon tax to Conservatives

OTTAWA – A day after the NDP indicated it was turning against the Liberal carbon tax, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the party that recently backed his government of having “no idea what to do to fight climate change.”  

“I know there’s a lot of people really disappointed with the NDP playing simple politics, walking away from progressive values, walking away from the fight against climate change, and totally caving to the political pressure from (Conservative Leader) Pierre Poilievre,” Trudeau said Friday at a press conference near Montreal. 

Trudeau said “it’s just increasingly obvious” that the NDP has had “no ideas on the environment” and said that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s suggestion Thursday that he would replace the Liberal carbon tax doesn’t make sense.

Singh said Thursday that “We want to see an approach to fighting the climate crisis where it doesn’t put the burden on the backs of working people, where big polluters have to pay their fair share.”

“And so we’ve been working on a plan, and we’ll be releasing our plan, our vision for how we can do that in a stronger way, in the coming months,” he added.  

It has been just over a week since the NDP cancelled a supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals in which Singh’s party propped up Trudeau’s minority for more than two years in exchange for influence on certain social policies.

“One of the first things they do after walking away from (the supply) agreement to deliver progressive things for Canadians, is walk away from any plan to fight climate change,” a visibly provoked Trudeau said Friday.

Poilievre has been campaigning heavily on Conservative plans to scrap the carbon tax and has vowed to make it the central issue of the next federal election. 

While Poilievre blames the tax for increasing the cost of living, Trudeau says it “puts more money in the pockets of the middle class and people working hard to join it” through a rebate. Premiers across the country have been increasingly calling for the Liberals to back off on carbon tax hike, most recently David Eby, in British Columbia, which was the first province to implement a provincial carbon tax. Eby said he would prefer to drop the carbon tax if the federal government stopped imposing its own mandatory backstop.

Trevor Tombe, a professor in the economics department at the University of Calgary, said the retail carbon tax is no longer viable and that it is now a question of “when, not if, it will be eliminated at the federal level.” 

Last year, the prime minister announced he was temporarily removing the tax from home heating oil and boosting rebates for rural residents. That decision, Tombe said, undermined the Liberals’ own argument that carbon taxes were not a source of the affordability challenge that Canadians have been facing over the last few years. 

“I think the biggest blow to the Liberal carbon pricing policy was what the Liberals did to themselves,” Tombe said in an interview with the National Post.  

“It is incredibly hard, if not impossible, for the government to sustainably defend the consumer facing carbon tax anymore,” he added, suggesting that the Liberal party “will almost certainly want to distance itself from this policy” when a new leader replaces Trudeau. 

Meanwhile, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault attacked the NDP in a video posted to social media Thursday, saying the NDP “caved to Pierre Poilievre and the conservative misinformation and disinformation campaign on carbon pricing.”

“Putting a price on pollution is the best way to reduce emissions. Jagmeet Singh and the NDP know that,” said Guilbeault.  

On Friday, the NDP’s deputy leader, Alexandre Boulerice, shot back and said Guilbeault was “completely desperate.”

“Steven Guilbeault is the one who talks out of both sides of his mouth while he misses his greenhouse gas reduction targets, Canada will become the second largest producer in the world by 2050,” he said in French in his own video. 

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