I returned the other day from a shopping expedition — gas, groceries, pharmaceuticals — with an empty wallet and a troubled mind. Prices for everything had spiked almost overnight, it seemed, and in some cases had nearly doubled. What was formerly a $70 grocery bill was now $107. A standard $75 for a tank of gas now set me back $100. A $30 bill for various pharmaceutical items now topped $40.

On the same day, we had our monthly heating oil delivery, a partial fill-up leaving us $500 poorer, not counting the Hydro One electricity bill of $140. Prices in my overtaxed home province of Ontario were always stratospheric, with many people having to choose between heating their homes and stocking their larders, a condition called “energy poverty.” Industry has fled the province to avoid the crushing tax burden.

Kangaroo courts called Human Rights Tribunals drain the public treasury of increasingly scarce resources while bankrupting unfairly accused defendants. Automobiles require special stickers at a hefty annual sum. Wind turbines rotate their blades lazily — that is, when there is any wind to speak of — defacing the landscape, slaughtering birds by the hecatombs, and producing little in the way of reliable power, albeit at enormous cost to businesses and homeowners. The situation may not be appreciably better in other parts of the Socialist Republic of Canada — Alberta, for example, has also been hard hit; nevertheless, when one factors cost and weather into the domestic equation, Ontario must be near the bottom of anyone’s habitation wish list.

Aside from near-unaffordable living expenses, the mercury has plunged dramatically. We are now in the midst of the coldest winter in living memory, with temperatures plus wind-chill hovering in the minus 40 area. The news channels warn us that merely two or three minutes outdoors without adequate protection — gloves, warm boots, balaclavas — can lead to frostbite.

Cars, trucks and rigs line the icy 401 autoroute at precarious angles. (Indeed, even parts of comparatively balmy British Columbia have endured huge traffic tie-ups and power loss owing to “weather events.”) At the same time the snowfall is relentless, heaping berms three feet high. There is no place remaining to shovel snow off our deck. We have had to hire diggers, snow plows and sanders to clear the steep entrance lane and driveway, adding another strain to the rapidly shrinking budget.

The two elements I’ve focused on of living costs and weather come together both practically and conceptually. Apart from a bevy of new taxes hitting doctors, farmers and small businesses, our pretty boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, ostensibly to fight global warming, imposed an onerous carbon tax on the country, a tariff which has kicked in with a vengeance. This explains in large part why I came home with an empty wallet — prices reflect the new fiscal burden.

It is empirically clear that there is no global warming to speak of, as anyone who simply looks around or dons an extra sweater must realize. Yet climate change impresarios like Al Gore and Michael Mann attribute the record cold now sweeping the continent precisely to global warming, marshaling a perfect storm of dodgy hypotheses, a cyclone bomb of meretricious research that has been discredited for years, in order to protect their reputations and their lucrative turf. According to these climate wizards, it appears that such glacial inclemencies as we are presently experiencing are triggered by warm air rising from the Great Lakes.

As Jack Hellner at American Thinker sensibly writes: “Warming does not cause record cold any more than cooling causes record warmth.”

Even a cursory perusal of a few recent volumes like John Casey’s Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell, Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager that demolishes the presumed bona fides of the so-called “experts,” and Jennifer Marohasy’s edited Climate Change: The Facts 2017 would demonstrate conclusively how computer simulations have homogenized and remodeled real-world measurements to conform to a pre-existent hypothesis.

In fact, the sun is entering a solar minimum which heralds cooler temperatures caused by the solar wind flowing through coronal holes. As the Sunday Express warns, “it could take up to 15 years for solar activity to return to normal with extreme weather and freezing temperatures continuing until 2035.” Indeed, with heating costs already out of the reach of many people, such cooling may prove economically catastrophic. This is the issue that needs to be addressed by responsible scientists and politicians.

If our prime minister were a serious man, he would have read into the subject and would have done well to familiarize himself with at least significant portions of the vast literature on climate change. But Justin Trudeau is not a serious man. He is a glib politician who wished to attend Question Period in Parliament only once a week — generally a 45-minute session. Not a bad gig, if you can get it. Trudeau is lazy and frivolous, more suited as a snowboarding instructor than as the leader of a country. Indeed, he is not well informed on any matter of major importance –his attempt to explain quantum computing, for example, was scathingly embarrassing. A preening charlatan, Trudeau’s glitzy superficiality should have disqualified him immediately from running for office — assuming a mature electorate, of course. But I suppose Canada wanted its Obama and got a carbon tax for its pains.

Gazing out my window at the undulating dunes of snow, I can imagine Trudeau snowboarding down the slopes as he did at Whistler, but for the life of me I still cannot imagine him as a prime minister. And I deeply resent being forced to pay an unnecessary carbon tax whose sole purpose is to fatten Liberal coffers and subsidize the Trudeau-sponsored influx of Muslim refugees clogging the welfare rolls while I slowly go broke in this failed province of a benighted country. To make matters worse, as the Fraser Institute’s director for resource setudies Kenneth Green explains, Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, a hidden carbon tax, installed by Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, merely adds fuel to the fire, or rather, ice to the snow.

It is 40 below zero in more ways than one. Costs will escalate, personal and public debt will swell, and the climate will go on cooling in this epoch of massive global warming. The federal Conservative party (though not the opposition Ontario Conservatives, whose leader Patrick Brown supports a carbon tax) is on record as determined to reduce the tax load that is crippling the country. But I suspect we have no political figures or prospective leaders brave and insightful enough to confront the ideological-and-profit driven racket of global warming and to tackle the lies that beset us. They will remain inscribed in the Paris Accord — a boondoggle benefitting only corporate interests, politicians, bureaucrats, paid environmentalists, suborned scientists on the government dime and Solyndra-type investors — which the U.S. under Donald Trump has wisely abandoned. Meanwhile we’ll continue to shiver and bleed.

Where, I ask myself, is our Trump? Nowhere, I’m afraid, in this cold and unpromising land.