Pizza lovers beware – Trudeau is cracking down on your favorite wood-fired pizzas and bagels.
In a move that is sure to spark outrage, federal agencies are now targeting pizzerias and bagel shops over air pollution concerns.
The implications could be massive – is this the end of wood-fired pizza as we know it?
Conservatives have already blasted the government’s “crusade against pizza ovens” as an overreach into small businesses.
At least now we know that we have a leader who can take a stand against the issues keeping Canadians up at night – big, scary pizzas threatening our safety and wellbeing.
All jokes aside – the Trudeau government may have bitten off more than it can chew by cracking down on pizzas and bagels, out of all the pressing issues plaguing our country today.
Could this be the start of another carbon tax? Or dare I say – a “pizza tax”?
The Trudeau government is in fact going after pizzas and bagels, specifically in Montreal.
Montreal is home to some of the best wood-fired bagels and pizza in North America. The scent of maple wood smoldering in century-old brick ovens flows through the streets, reminding residents that they live in a place that values timeless traditions.
There are about 100 commercial outlets on the island of Montreal that still cook food — bagels, pizza, grilled chicken, for example — in wood-fired ovens or over charcoal grills.
But now those traditions are under threat by an overzealous federal government convinced that cracking down on local pizzerias and bakeries will save the planet.
In their latest regulatory overreach, Environment and Climate Change Canada, or the ECCC is investigating whether wood-fired cooking establishments should be forced to report their emissions to the National Pollutant Release Inventory, or the NPRI, each year.
The National Pollutant Release Inventory is a government-run database that tracks pollution from industrial, commercial, and institutional facilities across Canada.
Facilities that meet certain criteria are required by federal law to submit annual reports to the NPRI detailing all of their emissions to air, water, and land.
The NPRI compiles this pollution data and makes it available to the public. It reports this information to none other than the Minister of Environment and Climate Change.
“The NPRI program has recently undertaken compliance promotion activities targeting some wood-fired ovens such as pizzerias and bagel shops across Canada, including Montreal,” Cecelia Parsons, a spokesperson for the ECCC, told The Gazette in a written statement.
As usual, the Trudeau government is more concerned with the optics of “doing something” about the climate, instead of actually considering how their actions will impact small businesses and erode citizens’ quality of life.
While the city of Montreal stalls on this issue, the feds are stepping in to snuff out the iconic wood-fired fare under the guise of environmental protection.
ECCC has already begun targeting pizzerias and bakeries for “compliance promotion” to determine if they cross arbitrary emissions thresholds that would trigger cumbersome NPRI reporting requirements.
Once again, the natural instincts of the Trudeau Liberals are on full display: centralized power, burdensome regulations, and a desire to micromanage the economy and restrict freedom.
Sounds like the beginning of another carbon tax all over again.
The NPRI does not actually set any limits on the amount of pollution companies can emit. It is simply a reporting tool.
However, it does have teeth in that the federal government can levy fines against businesses that are required to report their emissions but fail to do so properly or on time.
In other words, the NPRI creates yet another layer of red tape and threat of penalties that small businesses must comply with or else face financial punishment.
It’s just more and more administrative burdens that hard-working Canadians can barely afford.
This sounds eerily similar to Trudeau’s carbon tax scheme.
The carbon tax was initially marketed as a simple, sensible policy to curb emissions. But in reality it is a heavy-handed regulatory regime aimed at extracting revenue and inflicting economic pain on ordinary Canadians.
The NPRI reporting requirements seem to follow the same strategy – threaten struggling businesses with more paperwork and fines to force them into obedience.
Canadians are already suffering from inflated costs of living and declining real wages.
Imposing yet more government mandates and penalties will only make it harder for local pizzerias and bakeries to stay afloat.
This once again raises the question – when will enough be enough?
Canadians need affordability and opportunity, not more rules from Ottawa. Like the carbon tax, these pizza oven regulations seem poised to inflict maximum economic damage for minimal environmental benefit.
Struggling Canadians simply can’t bear the costs of more political posturing and empty yet costly green gestures from Trudeau and his hungry gang of Liberals.
Fortunately enough, though, there is one person who seems to recognize that, and it’s none other than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
He first addressed the Gazette article which broke the news on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, which Poilievere has adopted as part of his main campaigning platforms. And it seems to be working out for him, as his message resonates deeply with a lot of Canadians.
In a post on X, Polievre called out “the Trudeau bureaucracy” for its appalling crackdown on wood-fired pizzas and bagels.
In his typical sarcastic tone, Poilievere called to “decriminalize crack and ban wood-oven pizza.”
And when he was campaigning in Vancouver on Monday, he claimed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has “launched an outright crusade against pizza ovens.”
Polievere also chose a pizza oven as the background.
He rightly blasted the government’s “crusade against pizza ovens” as absurd regulatory overreach.
Standing beside a brick pizza oven as a prop, Poilievre quipped that pizza emissions are a “terrible, existential crisis to the entire universe.”
In a light-hearted approach, he made it clear that everyday Canadians are struggling to pay their bills and buy groceries while Trudeau obsesses about the emissions from cooking family meals and comfort foods.
Poilievre is correct to highlight how tone-deaf these climate regulations have become. Canadians have real economic worries that the Liberals are ignoring in favor of virtue signaling and headline-grabbing climate policies.
As Poilievre joked, Trudeau won’t rest until the great pizza oven crisis is resolved.
Clamping down on chimney smoke from a handful of restaurants will do nothing to impact global climate change. But it will threaten the livelihoods of local business owners and erode the cultural identity of Montreal’s iconic neighborhoods.
Canadians, especially those in Montreal, have been cooking over wood fires for years.
The brick oven was perfected in Italy during the Renaissance and remains the best method for achieving the perfect crust and smoky flavor that define great pizza and bagels.
Does Trudeau hate pizza or something? Is that the reason he’s cracking down on the delicious delicacy?
Even that isn’t the case.
Eight years ago, the Toronto Star’s Michele Henry made sure to release a hard-hitting expose about Trudeau’s love for pizzas, as he visited a popular pizza shop in Toronto and even made pizzas with the executive chef.
So while Trudeau gets to enjoy pizzas himself, he still feels the need to crack down on small business and already struggling Canadians.
Rather than a climate crime, the wood-fired oven is a crowning achievement of human ingenuity and craftsmanship. Its continued use connects modern chefs to centuries of culinary history.
But to the Liberals, these ovens are nothing more than smoke-belching machines in need of regulation.
It apparently doesn’t matter that they predated modern environmentalism by centuries. Anything not invented in the last decade with sleek electronic controls must be viewed with suspicion by the Trudeau Liberals.
This latest crackdown on pizza ovens aligns with the Trudeau government’s broader agenda of imposing strict new Liberal regulations at every turn. It fits their pattern of using the power of the federal government to coerce citizens and businesses into adopting their Liberal ideology.
Guilbeault in particular seems intent on regulating every facet of the economy in the name of environmentalism. Just last week he reiterated his plan to create a national plastic registry to force plastic producers to account for all their waste.
The Trudeau Liberals’ appetite for centralized control and overbearing regulations appears limitless. Given the chance, they would mandate carbon accounting for nearly all human activities from driving to making pizza.
Their vision is a hyper-regulated economy where everything is monitored by bureaucrats.
Do they not have anything else to worry about?
Canada is currently plagued with inflation, soaring costs, and an overall affordability crisis. But no, let’s target pizzas instead. The real threat.
According to Justin Trudeau, that’s the top priority right now, not the alarming number of struggling Canadians under his watch. All while he takes private jet after private jet, whether it’s to his undisclosed vacations, or to elite global conferences that do nothing to help his people back home.
This is not a joke. Sadly.
