Ontario Court Rules That the Government Can Impose a Life Tax on People

Maybe it's time for Ford to take a cue from Kenney and separate from the rest of Canada:

Ontario’s top court has ruled the federal government’s carbon charge is constitutionally sound.

In a split decision, the five-judge panel rejected a challenge from Premier Doug Ford‘s government to the validity of the carbon-pricing law.

Ottawa maintains it had to act to deal with the urgent threat of climate change as an issue of national concern.

The federal government said its approach  — imposing a levy on gasoline and fossil fuels — respected provincial jurisdiction.

Ontario and three other provinces argued the Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau overstepped its authority in imposing the charge.

Last month in a split decision, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal sided with Ottawa in a similar challenge.

Of course Justin did.

It's a blow to provincial rights.


Also:

And even among first-mover countries, any shift to a new energy source must inevitably rely on traditional energy sources for implementation. Wind turbines and solar cells require plenty of CO2-powered energy to produce and transport. The same goes for all the cement, iron, plastic and chemicals our modern world still depends upon. This deeply embedded demand for traditional and reliable power is why Germany’s much-touted Energiewende, the sweeping government policy meant to wean the country off fossil-fuels entirely, was recently declared a “failure” by Der Spiegel magazine. So much for a Green New World.

As noted Canadian energy scholar Vaclav Smil (Bill Gates is a huge fan) points out in his recent book Energy and Civilization: A History, “the ubiquity and magnitude of our dependence on fossil fuels, and the need for further increases in global energy use, mean that even the most vigorously pursued transition could be accomplished only in the course of several generations.”

Smil’s work — he’s the source of the data in our attached chart — offers a blast of real-world evidence refuting claims that bold government declarations of ever-higher carbon taxes or clean energy subsidies or coal plant bans are all that’s necessary to rapidly transition to new forms of energy. “It takes two or three generations, or 50-75 years, for a new resource to capture a large share of the global energy market,” Smil writes bracingly.

That's a nice bit of reasoning but surely the writer knows that people are not going to switch to hybrid cars that are plugged in and recharged by conventional energy sources. No one is going to rely on solar power during the winter and the less said about the ineffective wind turbines, the better. The government knows this and taxes accordingly.

If it isn't obvious that this tax is a money grab by now, when will it?