O'Toole's 'government-knows-best' carbon tax scheme is anti-Conservative Party

If you’re looking for a statist political party, Canada has many options.

The Liberals and NDP are both pushing for a move further towards socialism, with ever-expanding government spending, rampant debt increases, and an ideology that seeks to make individuals, families, and local communities fully dependent on the centralized federal state.

The Bloc is also a heavily statist party, with the difference being they want the state to be centralized and powerful in Quebec.

The Greens offer statism, demanding massive government intervention to reshape the entire economy to fight what they call the ‘climate emergency.’

The Conservatives are supposed to be different.

They are supposed to be the non-statist option, the party that instead puts trust in the decentralized power, the empowerment of individuals, families, and local communities, and a smaller, less-intrusive role for the centralized federal government.

Along those lines, the Conservatives have opposed higher taxation, pushing instead for tax cuts.

A key aspect of Conservative ideology has been that people should be trusted with their own money, and that decisions on how to spend that money are best made by those who earn that money in the first place.

They have been explicitly opposed to the "government-knows-best" approach pushed by the statist parties.

Indeed, the Conservatives have had some of their biggest problems when they moved in a statist direction, particularly the immense backlash to the "cultural snitch lines" they unveiled to near-universal condemnation in the 2015 election campaign.

At their best, the CPC has been the home for the many millions of Canadians who don’t appreciate politicians telling them what to do.

But now, Erin O’Toole has decided to impose a decidedly statist carbon tax agenda.

O’Toole plans to bring in a $20 a tonne carbon tax, then raise it up to $50.

More than that however, he plans to take your money and put it into a ‘Low Carbon Savings Account,’ which is a nice way of saying the government will take your money away from you, lock it into an account controlled by Bay Street Banks, and then give you a state-approved list of ‘green items’ that politicians have decided are acceptable for you to spend it on.

As Darshan Maharaja said on Twitter, "this is the most un-conservative proposal ever."

"The government deciding what people can or cannot buy with their own money is something that I would expect from a Statist like Jagmeet.

This is the most un-conservative proposal ever."

Simply put, O’Toole has moved the Conservatives further into the statist camp, leaving Canadians with even less ideological diversity among our political parties, in a system that is already stunningly restricted in terms of open debate and creative thinking.

It’s a statist’s dream, and a nightmare for the rest of us.