Costs of Climate Change - A Potpourri

 

Amidst the back and forth about the costs of the hated Carbon Tax and all the other stuff.  Few are mentioning how much climate change is costing us.  Google AI came up with this:

Climate change is estimated to add approximately $700 to the average Canadian household's cost of living per year, primarily through higher grocery bills, rising home insurance premiums, and increased taxes for disaster recovery and infrastructure repairs. 

Here's a breakdown of how climate change impacts the cost of living:

1. Rising Costs of Goods and Services:

• Food Prices:

  Extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, can disrupt agricultural production, leading to food shortages and higher prices. 
• Energy Costs:

  Climate change can lead to increased energy consumption for heating and cooling, as well as higher energy prices due to disruptions in supply chains and infrastructure damage. 
• Home Insurance Premiums:

  Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events (wildfires, floods, etc.) lead to higher insurance costs for homeowners. 

2. Increased Taxes and Government Spending:

• Disaster Recovery and Infrastructure Repairs:

  Climate-related disasters (wildfires, floods, etc.) require significant government spending on recovery and infrastructure repairs, which can lead to higher taxes. 
• Healthcare Costs:

  Climate change can exacerbate health problems, leading to increased healthcare costs. 

3. Economic Impacts:

• Job Losses:

  Climate change can lead to job losses in sectors vulnerable to extreme weather and economic disruptions. 
• Reduced Economic Growth:

  Climate-related damages can slow down economic growth and reduce overall productivity. 
• Increased Inflation:

  Extreme weather events can disrupt supply chains and increase prices, contributing to inflation. 

4. Specific Examples:

• The 2021 season of climate disasters in BC, which included the heat dome, wildfires, floods, and landslides, cost the province over $17 billion. 
• Some economists estimate that inflation could rise permanently by as much as 1% a year due to climate change. 
• The expected global cost of climate change damage is estimated at $1.7-$3.1 trillion per year by 2050. 
• By 2025, climate impacts will be slowing Canada's economic growth by $25 billion annually, which is equal to 50% of projected GDP growth. 

Doing nothing isn't the no cost option some think it is.

Skippy - Champion of the Working Class?

 

From an article in Esquire magazine April 1st, 2025 as posted on Facebook by Albertans Against Separation

BUT HE REFUSED TO REPLY TO CTV KIDS' NEWS QUESTIONS.

PeePee’s so lame.

Article in Esquire.

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister Candidate Sure Seems Wired In with the Wing Nuts

What’s this, corporate ties to Elon Musk and Koch Industries while claiming to be the candidate for the working class?

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE APR 1, 2025

Plutocracy knows no borders. Neither does its beloved cousin, political corruption. The good people at the DeSmog blog have connected a whole bunch of dots, some of which lead directly back to the usual suspects this side of the Maple Syrup Meridian. There may be tariffs on Canadian imports, but the market in influence peddling is thriving.

The point person in Canada is one Pierre Poilievre, who is leading the federal Conservatives into the snap election at the end of April. Poilievre, it seems, has wired himself into the wing-nut welfare systems in both countries.

Koch Industries, Elon Musk’s X Corp., Loblaws, Enbridge, Pathways Alliance, the Canadian Gas Association, Rumble Canada, Rebel News, Canada Proud, and Facebook. These are just a handful of the corporate interests and right-wing communications platforms linked to the inner circle of Pierre Poilievre and his federal Conservatives as Canada heads into a snap federal election scheduled for April 28.

The key to the Canadian end of this continental drift to the right is the powerful Canadian extraction industries in the western part of the country. In this, of course, they are allied with the drill-baby-drill strain of American conservatism, and both wings were frustrated by the collapse of the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel intended to bring the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the petro-state wastelands of Alberta to the refineries of Texas.

Poilievre has for years portrayed himself as a champion of the country’s blue-collar workers who comes from “humble origins,” claiming during a speech last year that “when I’m prime minister, my obsession—my daily obsession—will be about what is best for the working-class people of this country.” Yet Poilievre and his party are linked to oil and gas companies that have made record profits from gas price inflation, grocery chains accused of price-gouging, and companies owned by the world’s richest man, Musk, a key figure in the Trump administration.

Using the map, it’s clear that the Conservative Party’s National Council, the party’s highest authority on governance matters, is a hotbed for corporate lobbyists. That isn’t a coincidence, as Conservative party members several years ago voted down a resolution barring lobbyists from the council, as The Breach reported. As a result, the organization has members such as Aaron Scheewe, managing director at the lobby group Capitol Hill Group, whose clients include X Corp.—the social media platform formerly known as Twitter—as well as MBDA Missile Systems and the Canadian International Pharmacy Association. Another council member, Anthony Matar, is a current lobbyist at Crestview Strategies, which represents cigarette companies, the oil and gas sector, and the Canadian arm of the far-right social media platform Rumble.

The council’s president, Stephen Barber, is a vice president at the lobbying firm StrategyCorp, whose clients include Pathways Alliance, an industry group comprised of Canada’s six largest oil sands companies. Poilievre himself has close ties to lobbyists. His former director of policy, David Murray, is now a senior vice president with the advocacy, marketing, and research group One Persuasion, which the National Observer reported was behind an anonymous ad campaign on Facebook claiming that “government regulation is making you poorer by stifling investment in Canada’s oil and gas sector.”

This is a far more conventional modern conservative movement than Trumpism is. For one thing, it is directly connected to a previous generation of Canadian conservative politicians.

For the first decade or so that Poilievre was a member of parliament, he served under Conservative leader Stephen Harper. That connection persists to this day through political operatives such as Hamish Marshall, a partner at One Persuasion, who says that “he was the liaison between the central agencies of government and the Prime Minister’s Office on all matters relating to public opinion research” during years when Harper was in power. Marshall also co-founded the right-wing media outlet Rebel News in 2015.

Harper, who is widely seen as Poilievre’s political mentor, is himself the owner of the lobby group Harper Associates, which shares a staff member with Wellington Advocacy, another lobby group that counts Koch Industries, Suncor, and Pembina Pipeline among its clients. Haley Love, a former Wellington consultant, has helped lead digital services for Poilievre. She also formerly worked with Mobilize Media, the conservative communications firm behind the Facebook account Canada Proud. Mobilize was previously retained to work on Poilievre’s leadership campaign for the federal Conservatives. Canada Proud has been running multiple Facebook ads attacking Liberal leader Mark Carney by insinuating he has connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

Lovely.

One thing that Poilievre and the American president have in common is the performative benefits of the Friend of the Working Stiff pose. The DeSmog report shows that approach to be as phony in Canada as it has been here, which, as we have learned to our deep distress, doesn’t mean it won’t work.

Why Are Conservatives so Angry?

 

A valid question.  Bathrooms?  Girls sports?  Taxes?  EVs?

A number of articles have examined this very topic.  Among them are:

From YES! Magazine - Why Conservative parts of the US are so Angry.

From The Star - We're not more Conservative - We're more Angry

From The Guardian - Why are US rightwingers so Angry - Because they know change is coming.

..... and many others....

Plus this comment that appeared on Facebook today:

Conservatives: your anger is valid. But it’s being hijacked.

You’re not losing your country because of “woke liberals.”

You’re losing it because the powerful need someone to blame — and they picked “them” instead of themselves.

Here’s how they fooled you:

>1. You feel like you’re being left behind — and you’re not wrong.

Wages suck. Everything costs more. Your job feels disposable. The world moves fast and doesn’t care how hard you work.

That’s real.

But the people who caused it? Aren’t drag queens or gender studies majors.

>2. They gave you a villain: “woke.”

They turned your real pain into a culture war.

Instead of fixing anything, they convinced you the problem is:

• Pronouns

• Trans kids

• College students

• Diversity

Why?

Because outrage is easier to sell, and it points the finger away from them.

>3. You’re angry at liberals because they look like the elite.

They have degrees. They read the news. They live in cities.

But those aren’t the people outsourcing your jobs, jacking up housing prices, or lobbying to keep your wages low.

The real elite are laughing — at all of us.

>4. You’ve been taught to hate what you don’t understand.

Not because you’re dumb.

Because fear is easy to sell.

Fear of immigrants. Of queer people. Of ideas you’ve never encountered.

And every time you get mad at “them,” you’re doing exactly what they want.

And it’s easier to throw hate at those you encounter in your community than billionaires you’ll never meet.

>5. “Woke” isn’t ruining your life — billionaires are.

They’re stripping your benefits, privatizing healthcare, making record profits while you fight each other online about bathrooms.

And while you’re arguing about flags or books, they’re buying your neighborhood.

>6. You’re not conservative anymore — you’re reactive.

You’ve been trained to respond to every issue with rage, sarcasm, or mockery.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you felt hopeful about a policy, a leader, or the future?

Because they don’t want you hopeful. They want you mad.

>7. The truth is: you’ve been lied to.

Not by your neighbors. Not by “the woke mob.”

But by the people who need your vote, your loyalty, and your outrage — to stay rich and powerful while your life stays hard.

>8. You deserve better.

You deserve healthcare.

You deserve a living wage.

You deserve to retire without fear.

You deserve truth, not distraction.

But to get that, you have to stop fighting the people who aren’t your enemy.

They told you the culture war was about values.

It’s not. It’s about control.

The more distracted you are, the less you’ll notice who’s robbing you.

And right now, you’re willing to hand them the keys to your poverty and cheering any libtards while you do it.

The OP was published on Threads - Brandon Weber

The Conservatives Fall From Grace?

Dissecting the Conservatives' fall from grace. 

Two months ago, the Conservatives seemed destined to romp to a majority government.  Now, the Liberals have taken the lead.  This article examines some of the possible reasons.

This article was posted on Facebook on March 31st, 2025, by Sean Prpick, a freelance journalist based in Regina.  It was written by Susan Delacourt and published in the Toronto Star.  I'm posting it here in its entirety for the record.  I've highlighted a few sections that I found especially interesting.

The Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt today on why Pierre Poilievre’s chippy, attack dog personality is making it very difficult for him to shift gears in the federal election campaign.

****

Pierre Poilievre’s big problem as Conservatives slide in the polls? He can’t turn his enemies into friends

Pressure is building for the leader and his team to shift their entire approach to this campaign, writes Susan Delacourt.

March 31, 2025

Pierre Poilievre went into this election campaign with plenty of political skills, but lacking one he needs right now — the ability to turn enemies into friends.

That could be a tall order for this take-no-prisoners Conservative leader.

As each day brings a new report of unrest within the Conservative team, pressure is building for the leader and his team to shift their entire approach to this campaign. The consensus seems to be that they’re fighting like it’s 2024, but this is 2025, and the Donald Trump reality has to be tackled head on.

But it’s not just that. It is increasingly clear that Poilievre was prepared to fight a front-runner’s campaign, cruising to a majority and simply put, that’s not the bright future before Conservatives right now.

The latest projections by the Star’s Signal poll tracker put Mark Carney and the Liberals on course to win a decisive majority, around 190 seats — well above the 172 seats needed — while the Conservatives would win between 123 to 139 seats.

When you’re a front-runner, as Poilievre once was, you don’t have to worry so much about all the enemies you’ve accumulated along the way, whether that was Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, the other opposition parties or even the traditional media.

Poilievre has done next to zero outreach with any of those interests in advance of the election campaign, presumably because he and his team didn’t think they would need them. They may be learning to regret that now.

The Star’s Queen’s Park bureau reported that Poilievre and Ford finally did have a conversation just before the campaign launched but it didn’t go all that well. And then came the startling shot this week from Ford’s top adviser, Kory Teneycke, saying the Poilievre campaign was off the rails and the leader himself “too Trumpy.”

This is not what Poilievre needed, to say the least, and it seems to have emboldened a subsequent series of Conservatives to start venting in the media about how the leader and his chief adviser, Jenni Byrne, are not up to the task at hand.

Not so long ago, you wouldn’t have found Conservatives brave enough to say that out loud to the media, even anonymously. But maintaining discipline through fear and intimidation is more difficult when the leader is running from behind.

Worse, that kind of leadership can also be seen as “too Trumpy,” to borrow Teneycke’s phrase. Are Canadians looking for a prime minister who, like Trump, is a party of one, demanding nothing but obsequious silence from his own troops?

James Kanagasooriam, a U.K. pollster who worked on the Conservatives’ last campaign in 2021, put up some social-media posts over the weekend highlighting the peril of Poilievre getting linked too closely to Trump. He appears to think this is a big problem for the Conservatives at the moment.

“The ballot question is about Trump. Not being like a Trump is as important as criticizing him,” he wrote.

He also noted that the Canadian electorate is extremely fluid, which means “not being hated is critical.”

Poilievre, unlike his old boss, Stephen Harper, has done little to build any bridges to the Bloc Québécois or New Democrats since he became leader, perhaps assuming that he would have a majority and not need their help in a minority Parliament.

As things now stand — and it is early — that majority seems elusive, if not impossible. My colleague Mark Ramzy reported on Saturday how Poilievre seemed to be offering an olive brach to the Bloc by vowing not to challenge Quebec’s language laws, but on that same day, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh ruled out propping up a Conservative government. Perhaps two years of trashing his fellow opposition parties as dupes of the Liberals have reached a reckoning point for Poilievre.

Similarly, Poilievre and his team could be finding that their hostility to traditional media could be coming back to bite them. Keeping all media off the campaign plane, for instance, may have seemed like a good idea when the Conservatives thought they would romp to power without the bothersome journalists asking questions all the time and simply channel all their communication through friendly, right-wing outlets.

But having reporters aboard a campaign plane presents opportunities for advisers to give background and context; to see the leader away from the podium and the talking points. Poilievre hasn’t been taunting his media questioners as much on the campaign trail as he did in press encounters before the election.

Perhaps that is, again, an effort to distance himself from the media-baiter Trump, or just a sign that all-enemies-all-the-time doesn’t work when you’re fighting for the centre.

Conservatives suited up for this election to play an aggressive game of offence.

The polls so far show that a more defensive game is required; one that requires making fewer enemies, or even turning those enemies into friends.

Election 2025 Prognostications

 

Canada's Federal Election will be held on April 28th, 2025.

Until a couple of weeks ago, it seemed the Conservatives would win a majority.  Actions by the American administration have turned that on its head.

My plan is to update this blog twice.  Once around mid-April and again after the election results are in.

Polls vary widely, but indications at this point (March 28th) seem to indicate the Liberals winning a majority.  This article seems to be the most optimistic.  I haven't tried to find countering views.  As a former PM once said, "Dogs know what to do with poles".... (or polls, whatever).  So for what it's worth, this is one prognostication as of 2 days ago.

Read Canadian Poll Shocker for the full article.  Here is the very brief summary.

According to EKOS:

📊 Liberals: 50% popular support
🧌 Conservatives: 35%
🟠 NDP: 7%
🟢 Greens & Bloc: somewhere between “meh” and “microscopic”

Seat-wise? It’s an absolute obliteration:

🟥 Liberals: 251 seats
🟦 Conservatives: 90 seats
🟠 NDP: 12 seats
🟩 Bloc: 24
🌱 Greens: 1
🪦 Poilievre: zero charisma, zero seat, zero plan

Next update around mid-campaign.