2023’s top 10 news themes and events

OTTAWA — Farmers headed into 2023 with average crop yields in the bin, while under the gaze of government policymakers increasingly concerned with agriculture’s output of greenhouse gases, not grain.

So here’s a look at the sometimes surreal top 10 news themes and events of 2023, many of them influenced by the climate change agenda.

1. The farmers’ carbon-tax exemption bill killed by the Senate.

It was all over for Bill C-234, even the crying. Highly anticipated by the agricultural sector, the farmers’ carbon-tax relief bill came to an ignoble end in the Canadian Senate on Dec. 5, triggering wider fallout on the Hill.  Eight months after a majority of duly elected MPs approved the bill (with most Liberals opposed),  Trudeau-appointed senators finally plunged it into a kind of parliamentary limbo by voting in favour of a late amendment.  The procedural maneuver, okayed in a 40-39 squeaker, requires the bill to return to the House of Commons where the governing Liberals are expected to suppress it indefinitely.

Once the Senate officially doomed the bill, the Official Opposition Conservatives launched a full-out filibuster of the government’s agenda. Leader Pierre Poilievre vowed that the House would sit through Christmas unless the governing Liberals axed the carbon tax altogether. The Conservatives managed to tie up the House for 30 hours straight by compelling a line-by-line vote on more than 130 items in the Liberals’ fall economic statement mini-budget. But eventually, the lines ran out and the marathon session ended on Dec. 8. The Liberals then delayed the scheduled debate on another bill, until the New Year, to deny the Poilievre Conservatives another shot at keeping the House sitting into the Holidays.