I just wanted to give some preamble for why I'm making the motion, so I'll get it done pretty quick here.
Most know that the Northwest Territories has set up their own carbon tax regime. They were given an option by the Prime Minister to either do it his way or to do it their own way, so they chose to go their own way. The reason was that they wanted to be able to provide their residents and citizens with rebates for the carbon tax. The Northwest Territories has some of the coldest temperatures in our country and they wanted some flexibility.
Sadly, this April, the Prime Minister said that they can't rebate their citizens and that wasn't what they had in mind when they said you have to come up with your own carbon tax, so there was a mandate that they had to get rid of those rebates.
Here we are again. We see the Prime Minister exempt certain areas of the country's home heating oil from being carbon-taxed, and this left out the Northwest Territories. To top it off, at the time that the Prime Minister made this announcement, they were going through a territorial election.
Here we are with an area that is the most impacted by the carbon tax, and it is still mandated that they have to have a carbon tax. Again, with regard to the first comments from this new premier, I'll use his own words:
“Here in the Northwest Territories, the cost of living is high. The cost of fuel, home heating, power—they've always been high. [If] high costs is what is going to get people to use green energy and green technology, we would have been doing that years ago,” he said Sunday.
But a lack of infrastructure, connection to southern power grids and other factors make it hard to implement those technologies....
He made a comment about heat pumps. Often, when the question comes up about the carbon tax, the Liberal answer in the House of Commons is always, heat pumps, heat pumps, heat pumps. It's even to give people free heat pumps. Heat pumps are very expensive. In the premier's own words, “Heat pumps don't work up here in this climate”.
I was recently—