Carney’s first act in office puts an end to an Albertan invention

Rest in peace to a real one: Canada’s carbon tax is dead, slain by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

It’s a policy move with particular resonance to Alberta and not just because all the conservatives here hate it. While a variety of approaches to pricing carbon have been tried over the years, the federal carbon tax cribbed almost entirely from the Notley NDP’s climate plan.

Consumption taxes can have regressive impacts—which is to say that they can tax the poor more than the rich—and so the carbon taxes were paired with cash benefits targeted at lower incomes. And on the industry side, a system called output-based allocations corrected for the carbon tax’s impact on competitiveness. That tax-rebate-OBA structure is what the feds replicated in their own carbon tax package, and has been ported over into other jurisdictions as well, like British Columbia’s in 2024. 

Despite what a flood of ads from the Conservative Party and oil-and-gas companies claiming otherwise, the impact of the tax fell mostly on wealthy households and on emissions-intensive industrial companies, just as designed. But the tax wasn’t just hated by wealthy conservative donors and corporate lobbyists. By the time Carney put an end to it, the carbon tax had very few defenders other than some very locked-in economists and environmentalists.

For that, I think we have the Notley administration to thank too.

I can personally attest as a former Alberta NDP door-knocker to how popular Notley’s climate program was with environmentalists and the left when it was first introduced, and how dramatically that opinion had curdled by the end of Notley’s term.

Acceptance of the policy rested so much on people’s trust in Notley herself, and for many environmentalists and leftists that trust was shattered when Notley put a figurative gun to her own climate plan’s head to appease the oil lobby. Prime Minister Trudeau’s rep with the enviros fared no better since that whole fiasco ended with the federal government buying the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Moreover, neither level of government had the will to raise the tax high enough to meet Canada’s climate targets, so it got harder and harder to argue that it was even working. By the time the feds starting carving out discounts for regional interests the whole thing was cooked.

Prime Minister Carney says he has some alternative in mind. I’ll believe it when I see it. The immediate impact of the end of this program, however, will be distributional: the carbon tax plus rebates regime was redistributing wealth down to working-class households. Odds are that if you’re reading this, your family will be a few hundred dollars poorer this year.

The UCP present their counter-narrative to “CorruptCare”

The Alberta government filed its statement of defense against former AHS CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos's wrongful dismissal suit last week and, wow, it’s punchy.

This document is written as much for the courts as it is for public consumption. Initial communications from the UCP when this scandal broke suggested that Mentzelopoulos had simply been dismissed as part of the dramatic restructuring of AHS presently underway, but that’s not the narrative they’re advancing now.

Mentzelopoulos’ allegations of corruption are just “a diversion from the plaintiff's own inadequacies,” the government argues now, in a bombastic document that proposes that Mentzelopoulos became infatuated with conspiracy theories and had to be fired because she wasn’t doing her job.

“Woman Bad” is always a winning argument with reactionary audiences—I see that Baldoni-Lively stuff is doing numbers on Instagram—but I doubt this line of attack will be well received outside of the UCP base. Mentzelopoulos, for her part, says she wants her day in court as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail just keeps publishing more stories with even more details of UCP-directed malfeasance at AHS. The latest: back before this even got started, AHS officials urged the Smith administration not to cut the ‘Turkish Tylenol’ deal with Sam Mraiche’s MHCare.

Recently from the Report

• On the Progress Report podcast this week, we get the latest from Susan Thompson, a freelance reporter who has been covering the ongoing conflict in Valleyview, where the local library is under political siege from a batch of odd characters including a UCP VP of comms and a convoyer who worked for the local MLA.
  
  
• From Jeremy Appel: This orphan well deadbeat was ordered to cease an unauthorized Bitcoin scheme. One down, hopefully not too many to go.

Sundries

• The leadership of CUPE Alberta says they have reached deals with school boards in Edmonton and Fort McMurray that may—if workers vote to accept the deals—end the education support worker strikes in those cities. Calgary, Sturgeon, Parkland, Foothills and Black Gold school divisions are not included in these deals.
  
  
• Edmonton Public Libraries (EPL) is in hot water after CSU 52 alleged that library management made staff take down Pride flags. EPL replied with a carefully worded statement that there was no specific directive to take down any Pride flags, but that the library wants a “neutral” environment. This did not convince many. Local freelancer Paula Kirman was on site to document a protest outside the EPL downtown location on Sunday. This isn’t the first time EPL management has taken a questionable position on 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion; back in 2020, an EPL trustee was kicked off the board after criticizing EPL CEO Pilar Martinez’s support for the Toronto Public Library hosting an event by anti-trans media figure Meghan Murphy on free speech grounds.
  
  
• Alberta’s anti-vaxx politics bear ill fruit: over the past few days, Alberta Health Services has issued warnings of measles cases in and around Fort Vermilion, Calgary, and Edmonton. Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to man and causes complications in around ten per cent of infections. For decades, we kept measles in check with vaccination, but anti-vaccination propaganda from figures including Danielle Smith appears to be dissuading people from vaccinating their kids, so here we are.
  
  
• Edmonton city councilor Sarah Hamilton says she is not seeking re-election. Local political commentator Troy Pavlek gets into why on the latest Speaking Municipally podcast. Meanwhile, Radio-Canada reports that Amarjeet Sohi is going to run for Liberal MP again rather than mayor.
  
  
• There won’t be judicial review of the Crown’s decision not to press charges Edmonton police Const. Ben Todd for kicking Pacey Dumas in the head so hard that the Indigenous teenager had to have part of his skull surgically removed. Court of King’s Bench Justice Michael Kraus ruled that Dumas’s lawyers failed to demonstrate that “the conduct of the Crown would shock the conscience of the community and undermine the integrity of the justice system.”
  
  
• Rest in peace to another real one: Big Shiny Takes, the Canadian media criticism podcast whose team included our staff writer Jeremy Appel, has released its final episode. The boys all got jobs.

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