1 week Ago By Lorrie Goldstein
Article content Get ready for buyer’s remorse on carbon taxes if Mark Carney and the Liberals win the April 28 election. The reason is the uncritical media reporting of Carney’s so-called plan to kill the consumer carbon tax and replace it with a better system. What he’s actually doing is a classic “bait and switch” manoeuvre — promising Canadians a less costly, more efficient carbon tax regime during the election, the unspoken part being that he will replace it with a more costly, less transparent system after April 28.
It’ s similar to what the Justin Trudeau Liberals did during the 2019 election, saying before the vote that they would freeze their carbon tax, which started at $20 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, then reached $50 per tonne in 2020, After the election, Trudeau announced the Liberals would increase the carbon tax by $15 per tonne every year after 2020, until it reached $170 per tonne in 2030. Even Carney didn’t claim he was scrapping carbon taxes — details to come — when he announced his new plan while running for the Liberal leadership. What the media backgrounder on what Carney planned to do actually said was: “Mark Carney presents plan for change on consumer carbon tax.
” Changing something isn’t killing it. Carney said to applause, “My government will immediately remove the consumer carbon tax, but we won’t stop there.” He said his new carbon tax will mean “you’ll no longer have to pay more to fuel your car or heat your home but when you choose an energy efficient appliance or an electric car or home insulation, you will be rewarded and we will get the big polluters to pay for it.
” This is hogwash. Carbon taxes levy a charge on Canadians for something they have never had to pay for — industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Carney’s claim he has invented a new carbon tax in which “big polluters” pay the added costs they face of using fossil fuel energy to create almost all goods and services, without passing them along to consumers in hidden higher prices, is absurd.
Carney, an advocate of higher carbon prices, knows this is nonsense and he’s not eliminating the carbon tax because, in his words, “If we were only to remove the carbon tax,” it would create other “problems.” What little we know of Carney’s plan — details to come — is that far from killing the consumer carbon tax, he will fold it into what he describes as an “improved and tightened” — translation, more costly and less transparent — industrial carbon tax known as the Output Based Pricing System (OBPS). Carney says the Liberals will also develop a new “carbon credit market” within the OBPS, while extending its operation from 2030 to 2035.
This new system, Carney claims, will both reward consumers for making energy efficient choices (replacing carbon tax rebates) and provide price certainty to big polluters facing increased costs which Carney simultaneously claims they won’t pass along to consumers in higher prices. Simply put, this is bafflegab. Carney also intends to create a “Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism” — a deceptive term that really means that a Liberal government will impose tariffs on foreign goods imported into Canada from countries that don’t have carbon taxes.
That will result in higher consumer prices for Canadians purchasing those goods — a tariff which, in Carney’s world using Donald Trump’s logic, will somehow magically lower the cost of living for all of us..
