William Watson: Trudeau embraces the market, Poilievre class warfare

financialpost.com:

We spend so much time in this business slagging politicians for saying stupid things that when they do say something wise or profound or even just correct, we owe it to them and to you, reader, to say so.

As Matthew Lau points out, last week Justin Trudeau went after Pierre Poilievre and seven provincial premiers for wanting to cancel April 1st’s hike in the carbon tax. The argument he used was classic mainstream economics. A carbon tax is better than asking the “heavy hand” of government to “pick winners and losers” with regulations and subsidies. “I prefer a cleaner solution, a market-based solution, of saying, ‘You know what? If you’re behaving in ways that are gonna cause pollution that is going to impact the whole community, you should pay for that pollution.” Categorizing carbon emissions as “pollution” is slippery sleight-of-hand but if such emissions do harm the climate, an overwhelming majority of economists — 90 per cent in a Clark Center poll of American A-listers — believe a carbon tax is the way to go.

(Trudeau added the classic end-days justification of all politicians in their professional death spirals: “My job is not to be popular — although it helps. My job is to do the right things for Canada now and do the right things for Canadians a generation from now, and that’s what I’ve been focused on. And yeah, it’s not always popular.” Echoes of Brian Mulroney after his own popularity had tanked.)

But of course, as Lau notes, when the subject of the “heavy hand” of government comes up, well, you’ve heard of Edward Scissors-Hands. As policy goes, the prime minister is “Justin Anvil-Hands.” You want winners and losers? How about Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt and $32 billion in subsidies? And they’re just