Don’t be blue over going green, Erin O’Toole
By Shachi Kurl, President
Erin O’Toole, what’s the matter buddy? Why are you hiding underneath that desk in a defensive crouch? Is there an earthquake drill? What? You proposed a form of carbon pricing and everyone’s being mean to you? The environment minister called your plan “unserious” and compared it to “Petro Points”? Oh, that sucks.
But c’mon bruh, what did you think was going to happen? You caught your caucus off-guard. And then there’s your grand reversal: just last month you said in an interview a “carbon tax … hurts people in the margins the most.” You called it “backwards.” And now you’ve got a carbon tax of your own! Oh right, it’s not a “tax.” It’s a “price.” Right, right.
But to be fair, the Supreme Court’s decision last month declaring Liberals’ existing carbon tax legislation constitutional marked the end of the road for politicians determined to fight it. It was one thing for your fellow Conservative premiers to link arms from Alberta to Ontario and form an impenetrable wall of red-rover style opposition against Justin Trudeau. But what are they going to do now? They might drop you from the WhatsApp group chat. You’ll get over it.
Besides, you’ve known for a while the stuff you’ve been talking about isn’t moving the needle among the voters you need. You keep going on about deficit spending when polling shows that while half (51 per cent) of your own past Conservative voters are fired up about the issue, just a fraction of past Liberal voters (14 per cent) are preoccupied with it. And while it makes sense to swing at the prime minister over failures around COVID-19 management, people are too busy being mad at their premier at the moment on that one.
For the rest of this piece, please view it on the Ottawa Citizen’s site where it was initially published.
