there is some irony, here; i support the carbon tax as a means of wealth redistribution, but i never expected it to actually be successful in stimulating innovation. polievre's demagogic grandstanding is merely demonstrating how free market policies like carbon taxation don't work in incentivizing behaviour.
where does this party stand in the spectrum, today? they remind me of the racist american populist and progressive movement of the late 19th century, which organized through the racist democratic party in the solid south and was old tory in ideology, which is authoritarian right-wing but collectivist in a religious sense and not at all pro-market. the party is increasingly reverting to it's roots as a christian progressive farmer's union. are there still funny socred economic ideas floating around in the reform party?
what a carbon tax can do and will do if left in place long enough is make existing solutions (that are currently less cost effective) more attractive, and make more polluting solutions less attractive. that is not innovation, but it might reduce carbon footprints nonetheless. if farmers are complaining that the tax is making them make hard decisions that means the policy is working to the extent that it ever could and the government should stay the course.
farmers need to make different choices and need to change how and what they produce.
climate change denial is the new slavery.
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it might have seemed odd to many to watch the conservative party win power in 2006 by promising a series of social welfare handouts, but that's because they didn't fully grasp that the conservative party was actually the rebranded social credit party and not the old tory party.
we used to have an actual conservative party in canada, but it was wiped out in the 1993 election and never recovered.
as it is, our conservative party in canada is weird; it's a christian progressive party with very weak free market or libertarian tendencies that has a lot of ideas that are hard to place on the existing spectrum.