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This feels like an overly simplistic analysis.
The conservatives successfully poisoned public perception of carbon pricing via willful lies, framing the (real) inflationary pressures felt around the world as being a locally Canadian issue and specially blamed on “the carbon tax”. This was aided by Trudeau’s lack of focus and his failing to ensure that the policy was a success, but PP and his legion of brain rotted influencers are the primary culprits.
Without ending the “carbon tax”, it was almost certainly inevitable that the CPC would win this election. It sucks, but it’s extremely difficult to paint a picture otherwise.
Carbon pricing is good policy. More than that, it’s the best “neoliberal” approach to controlling carbon emissions. Carney knows this as well as do, he argues for it quite persuasively in his book.
But it had to go, because letting PP win and sell the county to foreign oil extractors would be multiple orders of magnitude worse. And we will still get good carbon policy implemented by focusing on the industrial polluters with the stick and end consumers with the carrot. This doesn’t have the same market efficiency as carbon pricing, but it can be effective and will hopefully be more resilient against the attacks by the brain-rot peddlers.
I get it. May wants to pile on Carney because he’s winning and because there are scarce few voters who would be swayed from CPC to Green. But it sucks if these misleading messaging efforts take root — if they do, we all lose big.