If anybody could stomach watching Mark Carney’s interview on the Daily Show, they would have witnessed a public figure effortlessly fielding a string of puff ball questions posed to him by a host who could barely contain his unbridled enthusiasm. I was surprised that Jon Stewart didn’t lean over the desk and kiss him.
In response to a question about how Carney would be “left holding the carbon tax bag,” which Stewart argued was “not politically feasible,” Carney hinted that he would target the oil and gas industry with climate policy.
“Almost 30 per cent of our emissions from Canada come from the production and shipment of oil to the United States,” said Carney. “So part of it is cleaning that up, getting those emissions down, more than changing, in a very short period of time, the way Canadians live.”
If the government falls, the capital gains proposals will die. In tax law, it is very common for many technical tax changes to die when an election is called. But it is also very common for such tax technical changes to be reintroduced by the new government, even if the new government is being led by a different political party.
Why? Because such amendments are often technical clean-ups of the Income Tax Act and generally do not have broad-based application. In other words, most such amendments are not controversial. The capital gains proposals, however, do not fall into that category. They are broad-based and certainly controversial.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has a long-standing practice to administer tax laws based upon proposed measures. The tax community, including me, has long supported such a position given the non-controversial nature of most tax amendments.
Accordingly, the CRA has been administering the capital gains proposals as if they will become law. But the capital gains proposals are not simple technical amendments; they have broad and sweeping consequences for many Canadian taxpayers.
Here’s the key thing: Other media are acting like this is a win – that the deadline has simply been punted to 2050. Well, I actually read through the regulations and realized it’s a bait and switch. In fact, the regulations include an impossible to meet emissions standard for anything that burns anything by 2035. Even if you put carbon capture on every single natural gas and coal power plant in Saskatchewan and Alberta, if the CCS behaves anything like Boundary Dam 3, you won’t get anywhere close to the new standard of 65 tonnes CO2 per gigawatt-hour. So the federal government slyly let people think they’ve punted, when really they haven’t punted at all. Like Lucy, they’re pulling the football away in 10 years and 12 days. (That’s the amount of time we have to build carbon capture on everything. And even if we do, it won’t be good enough. Good luck with that.)
Watching CBC News Network is rather entertaining. The CBC is in full meltdown mode. For a bit there it looked like Rosemary Barton might issue a tear. Or maybe I was just seeing that through rose coloured glasses?
Jonathan Wilkinson near Kipling, announcing $50 million for a wind project in June 2023. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
In Pipeline Online’s continuing mission to ensure we all know exactly what the federal government is telling us on climate change initiatives, this is the verbatim press release from the Government of Canada issued at 18:10 hrs on Dec. 5. Notably, it was not sent out via provincial media releases nor SaskPower’s media releases. And apparently according to the feds, Jansen is a company, not the place the largest mining company in the world, BHP, is building the world’s largest potash mind. Check that out in the opening paragraph.
(You’d think the natural resources minister, and ministry, might be aware of the largest potash mine in the world being built in their country)
The announcement was made by Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson. He and Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault are the federal Liberal government’s lead ministers on their numerous and various climate change initiatives. For good measure, we’ve interspersed a healthy dosage of oil and gas ads, that industry that this government’s Bill C-59 is trying to muzzle.
Highlights include money for a number of solar projects, advancing SMR development, the intertie to the United States, grid-scale batteries, and a “forecast that there will be over 130,000 clean energy jobs added in Saskatchewan between 2025 and 2050.”
Oh, and I am willing to bet a Christmas cheesecake the $265 million number was set so they could say it was more than Harper gave carbon capture in 2008 ($240 million). Never mind 9 years of inflation meaning my kid cries after buying groceries.
Related: In an exclusive investigation, The Bureau delves into the U.S. government’s case, tracking the history of fentanyl networks infiltrating North America since the early 1990s, with over 350 organized crime groups now using Canada as a fentanyl production, transshipment, and export powerhouse linked to China, according to Canadian intelligence.
How is your mental health holding up after the re-election of Donald Trump this week? Do you need some ‘grief’ counselling? Did you take a day off work? How about a visit from an emotional-support duck, or some time to play with Lego? Believe it or not, these are all options being offered to grown adults at their places of work or study, to help cope with their supposed ‘post-election depression’.
Counties with mask requirements for employees include San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Napa, and San Mateo. But Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose, and San Mateo County also require visitors and patients in those health care facilities to wear masks.
Those mandates, which were announced weeks or months ago, run from Nov. 1, 2024, until March 31, 2025. A similar mandate was imposed across the Bay Area during the 2023–24 winter and spring months.
I wonder who gave permission to Trudeau to finally say this. People think it’s just a coincidence that several world leaders say on the same day they support long the use of long range missiles? Who is pulling these puppets strings? pic.twitter.com/PA3YmZ7cbz
“White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo was hoodwinked into dipping into her own pocketbook to pay reparations to a black producer in podcaster Matt Walsh’s upcoming documentary “Am I Racist?”
An undercover, man-bun-wearing Walsh, 38, goaded DiAngelo into ponying up cash to his producer named Ben to compensate for the sins of the past by first coughing up the money himself.
DiAngelo, 67, tells “fellow white people” that they should “always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking.”
It doesn’t matter if their contribution is just a few words. “When you use a phrase or idea you got from a BIPOC person,” DiAngelo says, referring to black, indigenous, and other people of color, “credit them.”
But the white diversity trainer has not always taken her own advice. According to a complaint filed last week with the University of Washington, where DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education, she plagiarized several scholars—including two minorities—in her doctoral thesis.
Liberal Senate appointee Charles Adler in a radio broadcast called Indigenous people uncivilized “boneheads” who should “get a job.” Adler’s remarks on Radio CJOB Winnipeg were so vulgar they prompted a formal complaint by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, records show.
“I don’t believe in living on reserves,” Adler said in his Adler On Line broadcast. “I don’t believe in ghettos. I don’t believe in federal government policy.”
Adler described First Nations as dishonest. “Do you think people of this community believe people running the reserves, the chiefs, are honest, have integrity?”
Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld fell short of an apology today after instigating a fracas that led two witnesses to storm out of a parliamentary committee hearing.
The MP had steered the rare summer meeting of the House of Commons status of women committee away from the planned topic of domestic violence, accusing Conservatives of putting together the agenda in haste.
That came just moments after the committee heard detailed testimony about personal experiences of intimate partner abuse.
“This is exactly what it felt like these last few years, where I’m literally showing my bludgeoned, bleeding, bruised body and the people who have authority and power in this country are saying, ‘Well, we care about you.’ But then they silence you.”
