In April 2001, I was still 15 and knew very little about USA politics. Yet it took a single misleading and high-stakes declaration from its then-president brushing off the Kyoto Protocol to put him at the top of my personal blacklist:

If Bush's rejection of an insufficient and highly flawed protocol could be excused, its administration's inaction, and even its disruption of climatic disruption response, kept making its position on my blacklist well-deserved.

A couple decades of laissez-faire later, climatic disruption has become even more obvious and economically taxing, not just to American workers, but to shoppers worldwide, contributing alone to an estimated 1% of price inflation every year.

So what does the party "leader" most likely to become Canada's next Prime minister offer to "fight inflation"? Pierre Poilievre, "leader" of the federal party with the most voting intentions, is well aware of how us poor Canadians struggle with inflation. His solution: stop carbon pricing.

In the end, there are indeed a couple things the Conservative Party of Canada is good at conserving: short-termism and economic illusions.