John E Marriott Photography

Please read this. It’s important. No matter what happens with the Canadian Federal election this year, one thing will be true — a significant percent of Canadian voters and media will have been successfully manipulated to oppose a beneficial carbon pricing approach that was either revenue-neutral or financially beneficial to almost all Canadians, with smart pricing mechanisms well understood to be one of the most effective ways to support badly needed #ClimateCrisis mitigation, ALL because of a continually repeated political slogan as lazy as “axe the tax.” It should take a lot more than that to get us to do something so dumb, so self-defeating, for our own future. Why am I including the media in this? Because instead of media doing their job and constantly informing the public that the “carbon tax” is in fact a strategic rebate program that more than makes most Canadians financially whole every single time the “ax the tax” messaging is reported, they gave up on that quickly (if they did it at all). They instead fuelled a false narrative of “affordability vs climate action” that was never true (“Canadian voters are just more concerned about affordability than climate action,” I just heard that false choice again on the news). Most media eventually just started referring to the program with shorthand like “the unpopular” or “the controversial” or “the polarizing carbon tax.” Those shorthand statements are factually accurate, but they leave out that the program is unpopular because of the highly successful misinformation campaign that the media itself helped. In other words, they reported the controversy and ignored the more important story that the controversy was manufactured based on misinformation and the media itself played role in it. At best, that’s lazy and unprofessional, and at worst that’s complicit. We’re essentially all responsible though. We should all be a lot harder to manipulate than this. And sadly, the consequences of being such “easy marks” are going to be huge. #ClimateCrisis #CarbonTax #AxeTheTax