The Ben Mulroney Show - Mark Carney's outrageous claim about needing a Carbon Tax to conduct business with Europe

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Mark Carney's outrageous claim about needing a Carbon Tax to conduct business with Europe Guest: Jason Kenney, Former Alberta Premier and Federal cabinet minister If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to own part of the company that makes your favorite burger? Now you can. With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share, so expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Every now and then, I like to know that I'm right about something. It makes me feel good. We all do, right? You know, you take a position and then you kind of wait to see which way it's gonna go and then, hey, you're right. And a couple of days ago, I had a back and forth with I think no, I wasn't a back and forth because she didn't respond. But I think I can't remember who

it was. But someone in the liberal government referenced the liberals reversal on the carbon tax as the reason for it was it was a divisive policy. And I wrote back I said, but it but the world is burning. The world is burning. That's why you put it in place was to save the world and surely a divisive policy that will save the world is worth fighting for. And while I'm saying it, dripping with sarcasm, it was an honest question. Just explain that to me. Explain how that makes sense.

And my next guest is here because it validates what I knew. See, I didn't know the story he's going to tell us right now that he shared on on Twitter. But it turns out the logic that I applied to that tweet was a logic that he brought forth in a in a lawsuit. So let's welcome to the show Jason Kenney, the former Alberta Premier and federal cabinet minister. Mr. Kenney, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Good to be here, Ben. So, so I just referenced a story that I told I said, you can't have it both ways. Either the carbon tax was here to save the world from burning or it wasn't. So which one was it?

And it turns out you had this, that's a similar thought. Yes. So when I got elected premier of Alberta a few years back, Ben, one of my top commitments was to scrap the Alberta NDP retail carbon tax, which I did. And then I promised to sue the government of Canada for its carbon tax, which I did. And then I promised to sue the government of Canada for its carbon tax, which I did. That we won at the Alberta appeal court in a big win, like four to one,

that went up to the Supreme Court of Canada. And then the federal government told the Supremes that they needed this carbon tax to prevent irreparable harm to human life. And let me quote from what they actually said. The federal liberals persuaded the court that it was necessary. Critical. Yeah, it was existential to human life.

Critical to the response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world. How noble. How noble this tax was because without it, Mr. Kenny, we were going to burn. That's right. It was the apocalypse. It was the end times. There was no turning around. It was the asteroid that was going to hit us and the carbon tax would save us. And the Supreme Supreme Court bought it. Six out of nine judges bought it. They actually quoted all this stuff in their judgment saying that look normally normally the federal government wouldn't be able to get into

this because this is a provincial area of jurisdiction but we are going to give the feds constitutional superpowers under what's called the peace order and good government preamble which is really really rare and a very unusual program looking to get the superpower to override the normal provisions of the Constitution to prevent an existential threat to human life with this carbon tax. And then they wave it away according to Mark Cardy with quotes a signature and I don't know. I'm still here. How are things down in Toronto? You guys still going?

Yeah, it's still going. So we had a big snowstorm a little while ago. But, but, but, Mr. Kenny, I've got to ask, to me, it feels like a miscarriage of justice. It feels like an abuse of power. It feels like somebody lied to the court. And so is there recourse? Is there redress that can be sought by somebody by somehow here? Yeah, I think so. You know, it might be a bit of a stretch, but I think Alberta could make an application to get back in front of the court and say, hey, even though this may not be material right now, we don't know if and when the feds are gonna try to do this again.

We want you to reconsider your judgment. Because it was based on a false premise, you were convinced by government lawyers that the carbon retail carbon tax was going to was necessary to prevent an existential threat to life in Canada and around the world. Clearly, that's not the case. You should reconsider this based on this new evidence. And so, yeah, somebody can and should do that, I think, frankly, because this is the court was humiliated by the government. Yeah, I tell you, I would have a lot more respect for the Liberal Party had they died on the hill of the carbon tax,

meaning had they gone into an election with it and said, we still believe in this. And then and that the people would have told them what I believe they probably would have told them. And then they could have said, you know what, we're going to we're going to move on from it. We tried it didn't work and the people rejected it. And now we're reinventing our environmental policies through another mechanism. But they didn't do that. This was the and the the gas lighting that's going on right now has made me lose a lot of respect for that institution. You know, Ben, they claim they won the last two or three elections, when I say one, that's very much in quotes, air quotes quotes because they got 32% of the vote in the last couple of elections but they claim they won

those elections partly on the carbon tax I don't think the carbon tax was ever really an issue and I always knew they were going to keep jacking up the price and it started to bite and people would notice it particularly with inflation doubling in the cost of housing massive increase in the price of groceries, that people would, and energy, people would start to notice it. And that's what happened. And that's why they, they backtrack. But this whole thing that they're covered in rich, this is the thing I can't stand about the Liberal Party of Canada, is they, they imagine that they are the guardians of some special virtue in Canadian politics. They stand on

a high principle. Yeah, right. This just shows that they are nothing but an election, a team that tries to win elections for any reason at any time. Well, the National Post pointed out that they're not picking party over country if they believe that the interests of the party is the interest of the country. And when you look at it through that prism, this sort of thing starts to make sense. Another thing, Mr. Kenny, and by the way, to our listeners who are just joining us, I'm speaking in conversation with Jason Kenny, former Alberta Premier.

When you were a federal cabinet minister, there was a lot of work that was done to build out trade, Canadian trade around the world and also with Europe. So I found it a little perplexing when our new prime minister said that we absolutely have to have an industrial carbon tax or we can't increase our business with Europe. And something I thought to myself, you know, somebody should really tell that to India, China, and the United States who

have absolutely no carbon tax whatsoever and do a heck of a lot of business with Europe. Yeah, I think of the 190 some countries in the world There are 20 some that have some kind of carbon taxes in place and Mark Carney yesterday said we basically can't do trade to diversify our Exports away from the US without the carbon tax and I thought hold on a second just a minute I was sat around the cabinet table with the Harper government. We negotiated, we went from Canada went from five to 44 free trade agreements. So we added 39 free trade agreements and a bunch of those came in through the Canada Europe trade agreement with the EU and the Trans Pacific Partnership with I think about 18 Asian countries.

And we did not have a carbon tax under Stephen Harper. That was never an issue. We have a Canada-UK trade agreement that is stalled over supply management over for dairy, but carbon tax is not part of that. Mark Carney said to get access to emerging markets we need this. Well, the biggest fastest growing emerging markets, places like India, China, Korea and so on, they don't have carbon taxes. None of the major energy producers do, you know, Saudi Arabia, Russia, US, the Gulf States. So I don't know what the heck he's talking about. Like, I believe, you know, I think Mark, Mr. Carney is a really

smart man. So why would he be so wrong about this? Or I think, imagine he can fool people into imagining that we have to shoot ourselves in the foot to make our export industries less competitive in order to gain access to global markets. It's just simply not true. Mr. Kenney, very quickly, what did you make of his assessment that,

and he said so in French, that it's really not his job when it comes to be in a leadership position on the liquefied natural gas file, because that's up to the provinces and you have to have a project and you got to get the buy in from the first nations. When, when you heard that, what did you think? I was really disappointed because I did think that in the light of the Trump situation, that we finally were getting a consensus to get our energy around the world. It's our biggest ace in the hole. We've got the third largest natural

gas in the world. And finally Mark, if we really want to reduce global GHG emissions, carbon emissions, our natural gas exports are the way to do it because that helps Europe and Asia turn off the thermal coal plants, reduce their emissions to produce power by at least half. If you're a serious green zealot like Mark Carney, then you should be leaning forward, exercising leadership to get Canadian LNG exports built. Premier Jason Kenney, thank you so much for joining us. Come back anytime. Thank you very much. Kenny, thank you so much for joining us. Come back anytime. Thank you very much. transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today. We'd love to

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