Justin Trudeau is on the political ropes and Jagmeet Singh knows it. Singh is calling for a new tax to pilfer the profits of Western Canadian energy companies and he won’t have to twist Trudeau’s arm hard to get it.Heat pumps have become the flavour of the week though for environmentalists, but it’s hard to say why. Heat pumps have been around for decades but have never come into popular use because they don’t work well in most Canadian regions and they cost a fortune. Even with $5,000 rebates being offered, few people are taking up heat pumps. Like solar panels on homes, they offer a supplemental source of energy but aren’t economical for most households.Insurance companies won’t cover homes with heat pumps if the house doesn’t have a secondary form of heat. They know the pumps are likely to fail during cold snaps and ruptured water pipes due to freezing can cause catastrophic damage. If you still have to pay for gas service and maintain a furnace on top of paying for a heat pump that could cost between $10,000 and $15,000 to install, it suddenly doesn’t look that appealing.Heat pumps use a lot of electricity and homeowners can look forward to a spike in electric bills even if their gas heating costs have dropped a little. Savings are marginal at best and rarely will the cost of the capital expenditure be recovered. All the same, heat pumps offer one option among many for home heating and cooling. Some people choose to install them and hey, good for them. If it’s an option that works for them, I certainly have no issue with their choices. The problem comes when the government taxes me to pay for somebody else’s heat pump.As with electric vehicles, people aren’t inclined to buy heat pumps without large subsidies. Also, like electric vehicles, people still aren’t buying in, even with large subsidies. The subsidies will have to be massive to encourage large numbers of people to invest in systems that don’t work well for them.So why the big push for the pumps? Well, it's because Trudeau stepped in it. He cut the carbon tax for home heating for people in the Atlantic provinces who use heating oil while keeping the tax in place for the rest of the country. It was a crass move to try to buy electoral love from the East coast and it blew up in his face. In a bizarre attempt to justify the move, Trudeau said it was to encourage people using heating oil to switch to heat pumps. How making it cheaper to use heating oil would encourage people to move away from it is a mystery that only Trudeau can understand.Still, this move brought heat pumps, which had previously been a seldom used heating option in Canada, into the spotlight. Heat pumps fit in with the environmental obsession of moving everybody to electric forms of energy despite the lack of electric infrastructure being in place to do so. They don't provide environmental benefits since much of the electric power in Canada still comes from coal and natural gas. It's virtue signalling at great expense.Jagmeet Singh knows people aren’t willing to invest in heat pumps, so like a good socialist he feels the government should do so on their behalf.The costs to convert every Canadian home to heat pumps would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars according to Western Standard energy writer Shaun Polczer. Even if houses already on pure electric heat were excluded, the costs would be astronomical.Singh may be economically witless, but even he knows the government doesn’t have a couple hundred billion dollars laying around. That’s why he has proposed stealing the money from energy companies with a “windfall” tax. Never mind the reality that even if the government stole every penny from energy company profits, they would barely get more than $40 billion dollars. Never mind that companies would flee Canada in such a circumstance and never mind how it would decimate the pension funds and savings of Canadians. Singh sees a target and in his simplistic economic world he would just propose nationalizing energy companies if they don’t cooperate. It worked like a charm in Venezuela right?While I doubt the government would be as bold as to scoop the entire profits of energy companies, it is very believable they would make a large grab. Trudeau is floundering and Singh is a slave to his socialist ideology. Neither party has anything to lose in enraging the prairie provinces.The policies of the government don’t make sense because the government isn’t trying to make sense anymore. Trudeau is throwing everything he has at the wall in hopes of somehow turning about his plummeting political support and Jagmeet Singh is working to take advantage of the government’s weakness. Get ready for the National Energy Program Part II as the Liberals hit the wall. The Liberals and NDP won’t be able to restrain themselves for much longer.
Justin Trudeau is on the political ropes and Jagmeet Singh knows it. Singh is calling for a new tax to pilfer the profits of Western Canadian energy companies and he won’t have to twist Trudeau’s arm hard to get it.Heat pumps have become the flavour of the week though for environmentalists, but it’s hard to say why. Heat pumps have been around for decades but have never come into popular use because they don’t work well in most Canadian regions and they cost a fortune. Even with $5,000 rebates being offered, few people are taking up heat pumps. Like solar panels on homes, they offer a supplemental source of energy but aren’t economical for most households.Insurance companies won’t cover homes with heat pumps if the house doesn’t have a secondary form of heat. They know the pumps are likely to fail during cold snaps and ruptured water pipes due to freezing can cause catastrophic damage. If you still have to pay for gas service and maintain a furnace on top of paying for a heat pump that could cost between $10,000 and $15,000 to install, it suddenly doesn’t look that appealing.Heat pumps use a lot of electricity and homeowners can look forward to a spike in electric bills even if their gas heating costs have dropped a little. Savings are marginal at best and rarely will the cost of the capital expenditure be recovered. All the same, heat pumps offer one option among many for home heating and cooling. Some people choose to install them and hey, good for them. If it’s an option that works for them, I certainly have no issue with their choices. The problem comes when the government taxes me to pay for somebody else’s heat pump.As with electric vehicles, people aren’t inclined to buy heat pumps without large subsidies. Also, like electric vehicles, people still aren’t buying in, even with large subsidies. The subsidies will have to be massive to encourage large numbers of people to invest in systems that don’t work well for them.So why the big push for the pumps? Well, it's because Trudeau stepped in it. He cut the carbon tax for home heating for people in the Atlantic provinces who use heating oil while keeping the tax in place for the rest of the country. It was a crass move to try to buy electoral love from the East coast and it blew up in his face. In a bizarre attempt to justify the move, Trudeau said it was to encourage people using heating oil to switch to heat pumps. How making it cheaper to use heating oil would encourage people to move away from it is a mystery that only Trudeau can understand.Still, this move brought heat pumps, which had previously been a seldom used heating option in Canada, into the spotlight. Heat pumps fit in with the environmental obsession of moving everybody to electric forms of energy despite the lack of electric infrastructure being in place to do so. They don't provide environmental benefits since much of the electric power in Canada still comes from coal and natural gas. It's virtue signalling at great expense.Jagmeet Singh knows people aren’t willing to invest in heat pumps, so like a good socialist he feels the government should do so on their behalf.The costs to convert every Canadian home to heat pumps would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars according to Western Standard energy writer Shaun Polczer. Even if houses already on pure electric heat were excluded, the costs would be astronomical.Singh may be economically witless, but even he knows the government doesn’t have a couple hundred billion dollars laying around. That’s why he has proposed stealing the money from energy companies with a “windfall” tax. Never mind the reality that even if the government stole every penny from energy company profits, they would barely get more than $40 billion dollars. Never mind that companies would flee Canada in such a circumstance and never mind how it would decimate the pension funds and savings of Canadians. Singh sees a target and in his simplistic economic world he would just propose nationalizing energy companies if they don’t cooperate. It worked like a charm in Venezuela right?While I doubt the government would be as bold as to scoop the entire profits of energy companies, it is very believable they would make a large grab. Trudeau is floundering and Singh is a slave to his socialist ideology. Neither party has anything to lose in enraging the prairie provinces.The policies of the government don’t make sense because the government isn’t trying to make sense anymore. Trudeau is throwing everything he has at the wall in hopes of somehow turning about his plummeting political support and Jagmeet Singh is working to take advantage of the government’s weakness. Get ready for the National Energy Program Part II as the Liberals hit the wall. The Liberals and NDP won’t be able to restrain themselves for much longer.
