In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland might be thinking as she pushes her capital gains tax increase:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.
On Monday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended her government’s raising of the capital gains tax by delivering a weirdly catastrophic lecture speaking of a Canada beset by poverty, division and angry mobs.
“Do you want to be in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” she said.
[…]
Monday
Rivers of blood. Mothers consuming their offspring. Houses of worship employed only as makeshift storehouses for the dead.Abundance will cease. Colour will vanish. The people you now know as loved ones will first become strangers, and then they will become enemies.
These are but some of the fates that realistically lie in store for a Canada that refuses to raise its capital tax inclusion rate from 50 per cent to 67 per cent on gains realized after June 25, 2024. While I am sympathetic to those who have worked hard and wish to retain what they have earned, I would urge them to consider the value of money in a Canada where the only remaining currency is one’s readiness to kill.
Tuesday
As deputy prime minister of Canada, I am fully aware that carbon taxes are an electoral liability for this government. But this is a problem not of policy, but of messaging.If we’re not able to tax carbon-emitting fuels to a rate of $170 per tonne by 2030, the most optimistic scenario I can offer is the complete breakdown of the natural world as we know it.
Agriculture will become a memory. Cities will become unapproachable due to the overwhelming smell of decay. Language will devolve and then disappear. Any surviving art or culture will only inspire fear, because people will not know what it is.
The air may be breathable, but we will wish it was not.
