Kamala Harris is championing a catastrophic Canadian policy

Kamala Harris is championing a catastrophic Canadian policy

By: Rachel Marsden

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – The carbon tax scam here in Canada is an abysmal failure, to the point where it’s increasingly looking like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is going to have to scrap it if he wants any hope of getting re-elected. Apparently, US Democratic presidential contender, Vice President Kamala Harris, didn’t get the memo.

Harris, like many Democrats, has repeatedly advocated in favor of pricing carbon. Because who cares if people have to pay more for fuel, or things that it touches in the consumer supply chain — which is everything? “Under my plan, there will also be a carbon fee,” Harris said during a CNN town hall earlier this year. “We have to monitor whether it is gonna be passed on to consumers, but I’m going to tell you, that should never be the reason not to actually put a fee in…a particular carbon fee.”

Harris’ statement is a rare gem that has apparently managed to survive her word salad chopper. Look, you don’t have to “monitor” whether a government tax will be “passed on to consumers.” The answer is yes. There. I’ve just saved American taxpayers a fortune in bureaucratic costs.

As for increasing the cost of living not being a reason to impose yet another tax — yeah, that sure seems like it would be a wise position to take in an election … if the number one issue wasn’t actually cost of living and the economy.

Harris seems to be implying that climate change — which the tax is meant to “fight” — is more important than people’s ability to make ends meet. That’s a great position if you’re running for president of Greenpeace and not of the United States. A Gallup poll published in October found that voters place climate change at the very bottom of the priority list in this election, with 26 percent of voters deeming it “not important.” Only transgender rights ranked lower. The economy ranked first among the 22 issues, with just 1 percent saying that it didn’t matter.

Canada has already been down this road — and is on the verge of making a U-turn. Carbon taxes have long been imposed either at the provincial or federal level, and they’re now considered so unpopular and useless that Prime Minister Trudeau is even being advised by prominent members of his own party to reconsider it amid skyrocketing cost of living over the past few years. He’s also heading into a federal election next fall against a Conservative Party opponent who has made the tax’s total demise a key campaign promise. The fact that it was just increased to 17 cents per liter of gas in April adds fuel to a political fire with a large enough carbon footprint to stomp out Trudeau’s political career. And even the leader of one of the two provinces with its own carbon tax, the westernmost province of British Columbia, has said that if the feds scrap it, he’ll do the same.

What’s the point of this tax, anyway? The extra cash is taken from all those so-called evil jerks who dare to own gas guzzling vehicles instead of nice electric ones powered by lithium and cobalt batteries mined by child slaves in Africa and which contaminate water and air with actual pollutants rather than just the plant food otherwise known as carbon dioxide.

About 90 percent of the carbon tax is then distributed by the government as it sees fit in the form of “carbon tax rebates,” based on family size and location. The more non-driving kids you have, the more the government will transfer you cash they stole from the single guy or gal who needs to fuel up so they can keep going to their income-taxed job. In other words, blatant wealth redistribution.

The other 10 percent of this slush fund is supposed to go into grants for businesses. There’s limited transparency regarding the recipients, but the Canadian government does pride itself on what it calls a “feminist approach to environment and climate action,” according to one of its websites.

“Through its climate finance programming, Canada will seek to apply a rights-based, gender-responsive and intersectional approach,” it specifies. I’m sure the guy driving miles to work in his Chevy pickup every day will be thrilled.

But one can at least feel good about the fact that paying a higher tax on fuel means that the bad weather will stop, right?

Guess not. In one of the latest examples, an “atmospheric river” hit the Pacific Northwest over the weekend. Not long ago, that used to just be called “heavy rain,” or “autumn” in this part of the world. Now it’s an excuse to bombard people with climate change propaganda and guilt. Guess my paper straws haven’t managed to get the job done. Maybe we could just go back to tossing recyclables in the trash, since things seemed better when we were all doing that. The climate tax didn’t even ensure that people in Vancouver cleaned the drains, so there was some flooding.

“As human-caused climate change continues to warm the planet, the number of days that the western U.S. will experience atmospheric rivers is projected to increase,” according to the US Department of Agriculture.

"Atmospheric rivers are also expected to be bigger and more hazardous on average.”

Sounds like something that only higher taxes can fix. And no one seems to understand that better than Kamala Harris, clearly unbothered about pratfalling straight into the same hurricane of citizen outrage that Canadian leftists have started to flee.