GUNTER: Liberals shifting gears on green policies to win back votes

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The federal Conservatives LOVE Steven Guilbeault.

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No, I haven’t got that wrong. I don’t mean Guilbeault is loved by his own Liberals.

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According to internal polling by Pierre Poilievre’s party, the federal environment minister is an enormous drain on Liberal popularity everywhere, except in Montreal and Toronto.

So, it’s not surprising, in a party desperate for broader support, that Guilbeault climbed down (sort of) from his pledge to stop giving federal money to new highway construction and is now also backpedalling on his net-zero power grid rules.

No concessions yet on his EV mandate (that only electric vehicles will be available for sale in Canada by 2035), but I am sure that’s coming.

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This has been quite a week for the Trudeau Liberals’ “green” agenda. It’s clear Canadians are beginning to push back against the federal government’s constant haranguing and preaching on climate change and its hypocritical application of the carbon tax.

On Monday, Guilbeault told a conference of transit planners from across the country that the Liberals had decided the country’s current network of highways is “adequate.” Therefore, Ottawa would no longer be handing over cash for new construction.

According to the downtown Montreal MP, Canadians should consider living in more densely packed neighbourhoods and taking transit or walking more (as if those options were a possibility outside of three or four downtown city cores).

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Just consider the math behind Guilbeault’s claim.

The federal government is letting in a million new Canadians each year (more if you count foreign students). Just as that is creating a housing shortage, it is quite quickly going to create a road shortage, too.

It staggers the imagination that a government that is flooding the country with newcomers could insist the current roadway system would remain adequate for more than a year or two.

Of course, by Wednesday, after Canadians had thoroughly mocked Guilbeault’s proposal, the minister insisted he hadn’t said what he very clearly had said in front of cameras and witnesses.

The point is, someone at Liberal HQ or the PMO was making the radical eco-minister back down, even if only a bit.

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Then on Friday, Guilbeault hinted he might soften his net-zero power grid regulations, too, released just before Christmas. He told premiers and other critics “they have been heard” and he soon expected to outline as many as a dozen “major changes.”

The Liberals’ polling must be revealing what the Conservatives’ is – namely that voters outside the blinkered “progressive” bubbles in Montreal and Toronto have had enough of expensive, inconvenient, “green” pipe dreams.

Indeed, a survey of Canadians’ attitudes, conducted by the very pro-Trudeau, very “green” Privy Council Office, found 70% of Canadians “strongly or somewhat agree environmentally friendly options are too expensive.”

An EV might sound like a nice idea in theory, but when middle-class Canadians go to pay for one, the 40% higher sticker price dulls their enthusiasm to save the planet.

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Expect the vote-hungry Liberals to shortly announce they’ll permit us to buy gasoline- and diesel-powered cars a bit longer, so long as we please, please, please agree to vote for them again.

They will have to be smarter backing away from EVs than they were backing away from their carbon tax. That reversal applied mostly to Atlantic Canada, because that reliably Liberal region was abandoning the party. But the move didn’t save Liberal fortunes there, while at the same time, the obvious favouritism cost them even more support elsewhere.

However, the carbon tax controversy caused the Liberals to try to prove they weren’t being inconsistent. So, they voted down a law eliminating the carbon tax on farm fuels, which will cost Canadian farmers nearly $1 billion this year and further raise the price of groceries.

Good strategy, guys.

The Liberals, led by Trudeau and Guilbeault, are suffocating their electoral chances with their “green” obsessions.

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