Canada’s carbon tax battle: Why Liberals and Conservatives can’t solve the environmental crisis

The debate over Trudeau’s so-called “carbon tax” is shaping up to be a defining issue in Canada’s 2019 federal election. Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined most of the country’s premiers in 2016 to sign a “pan-Canadian” agreement taxing carbon consumption, an alliance of federal and provincial Conservative leaders have made opposition to the carbon pricing plan a central focus of their campaign against the Liberals. Yet the Conservatives’ rhetoric, which evokes concerns over the tax’s impact on the cost of living, only masks the fact that their own policies amount to nothing but corporate welfare—the chief result of which will be to worsen economic inequality without solving the environmental crisis. The hard truth, unmentionable by bourgeois politicians, is that capitalism is incapable of adequately responding to the threat posed by climate change.