THUNDER BAY – The carbon tax is scheduled to go up by 23 per cent on April 1, so the Conservative Party of Canada is pulling out all the stops to campaign to stop the tax increase by pulling in as many votes as possible.
“Last week in Ottawa, our Conservative team gave the NDP-Liberal coalition a number of opportunities to spike that hike to stop that carbon tax hike, which 70 per cent of Canadians have been calling for and the majority of premiers as well have been calling for a pause to that carbon tax increase,” said Eric Melillo, member of Parliament for Kenora.
In Ottawa last week, the Conservatives put forward a motion to stop the carbon tax increase, but the motion was defeated.
Melillo claims that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives will try again before the week is out.
“Our party has been very clear that we're going to be the only party that will actually completely axe the carbon tax and remove it completely. But it goes up now automatically every year,” stated Melillo.
When asked what his response is to Melillo protesting in front of his office, Powlowski said: “The Common Sense Conservatives (Sunday) in a snowstorm drove from Kenora to Thunder Bay in order to make this point. You would have thought maybe Eric could have come and talked to me in the House of Commons because I'm about 20 metres from him. But no, they're the Common Sense Conservatives. So, who am I to question the Common Sense Conservatives?”
Powlowski found the entire demonstration from Melillo to be rather childish. He told Dougall Media that they should stick to debating in the House of Commons.
During the demonstration, Melillo stuck to the common sense party line by attacking the tax as a way to make everything more expensive.
“I found a number of people sharing stories with me and sharing their home heating bills as well. We're seeing a lot of cases now that the carbon tax is actually sometimes even more than the charge for the gas itself and people are really struggling to be able to get by. It's unfortunate that we've seen record numbers of people now going to food banks here in Northwestern Ontario and right across the country. More and more people are living in energy poverty, meaning they can't afford their heating or electricity,” said Melillo.
In response, Powlowski said he sees how people are struggling with the cost of living, but the effects of the carbon tax on the cost of living are small.
“But if you actually look and listen to what the experts are saying as to how much the carbon tax actually costs and results in an increase in the cost of living, it is not very much. So, for example, the governor of the Bank of Canada figured that the carbon tax resulted in 0.15 per cent of the increase in inflation,” stated Powlowski.
He also pointed out that the Conservatives have no climate change plan in place if they were successful in axing the tax.
Powlowski said: “So even Conservative economists think that carbon pricing is one of - if not the most efficient way of dealing with increased greenhouse gases and climate change. If you look and you calculate - and people have done this, the cost of a 2 per cent rise in temperature globally. They figure the cost of that will be in the trillions of dollars and every year it costs us a lot of money to deal with climate change.
“We had the heat dome in B.C. We had flooding in B.C. - just to rebuild bridges in B.C. was billions of dollars. Forest fires throughout the country. Drought in Alberta," Powlowski said.
"Cyclones hitting the East Coast. Fires across Canada and Ottawa. And in the spring, the smoke was so thick, it was kind of hard to breathe.
"Those things aren't without costs. When you look at the parliamentary budget officer, when they're figuring out the cost of the carbon tax, that's something they don't factor in, which is a substantial cost of climate change. That's a cost that not only we're going to bear but our children are going to bear. Our grandchildren are going to bear,” said Powlowski.
