No surprise there.
Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Protected Places feels all of Canada — not just Alberta — would be better served under a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre.
In an exclusive interview with The Western Standard, Calgary-Shaw MLA Rebecca Schulz said the present Liberal government under any iteration thereof — even with former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney at the helm — is unlikely to turnaround what she described as a ‘disastrous’ range of energy and environment policies that have driven up prices at home while alienating major trading partners such as Japan and the United States.
Schulz last week returned from a major trade mission to Japan to discuss the possibility of increasing Canadian LNG exports, of which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau infamously said ‘there is no business case’.
In fact, Schulz said the opposite is true; Japan is eager to buy all the LNG they can get and apply greenhouse gas reduction credits under the Paris Accord.
She said they were perplexed at the position of the federal government on both energy and environmental issues.
“When you're just sitting there and somebody on stage says, like, yeah, we know Alberta has lots of natural gas, but where's Ottawa? And I thought that's something I would say, right?”
Schulz has a well-deserved reputation for being sharp, witty and not afraid to speak her mind. She also has the confidence of Premier Danielle Smith on issues related to the intersection of energy and policy on a provincial, national and increasingly international level.
“We have Mark Carney, who you know very much, has supported that ’Pro Carbon Tax’, pro activist agenda. So we're not seeing anything from them that will essentially move our country in a different direction.”Rebecca Schulz
That’s where Ottawa is increasingly failing, whether it’s with a carbon tax that is driving up the cost of everything — not just in Alberta — to misguided emissions caps and so-called ‘clean’ electricity regulations that are driving away investment and creating uncertainty among Canada’s trading partners.
Ironically, those policies are undermining its own environmental and economic goals whether it’s Bill C-69 the ‘no more pipelines’ act or the emissions caps or even the carbon tax itself.
“I firmly believe we need a federal Conservative government. You know, obviously we need to get rid of these barriers. We need to move quickly on market access and building pipelines across our country, I would say multiple directions, that our premier has been a champion for,” she said.
“We need to get rid of the emissions cap. We need to take that off the table. We can't have policies that are going to curtail production and essentially then curtail our ability to meet the demands of our major trading partners.”
That’s despite the fact that Canada will essentially have a brand new government on March 9, whether an election follows or not. she notes that even though frontrunner Carney has vowed to scrap the consumer portion of the carbon tax, he had a large role in informing the policy decisions that led to it in the first place.
“I obviously do have concerns with this current federal Liberal government, and I don't think that any of the candidates who are running for the future, liberal leadership have really committed to changing course,” she said.
“We have Mark Carney, who you know very much, has supported that ’Pro Carbon Tax’, pro activist agenda. So we're not seeing anything from them that will essentially move our country in a different direction.”