GOLDSTEIN: Detailing Liberals' carbon taxes for dummies
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Since the Justin Trudeau Liberals — apparently soon to become the Mark Carney Liberals — have been treating Canadians like dummies in their defence of carbon taxes for a decade, today let’s review their arguments in favour of them.
(1) Carbon taxes only target “big polluters”
This is nonsense. Carbon taxes impose on society a new cost we have never been charged before — the emission of industrial greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Someone has to pay for this. There is no free lunch and the public always ends up paying, either through higher taxes or higher prices or both, under cap-and-trade carbon pricing systems.
(2) A carbon tax is the most efficient way to reduce emissions as opposed to government subsidies and regulations
Arguably true, except Trudeau who has made this point in defending carbon taxes imposed all three on us — a national carbon tax plus government regulations and subsidies — for example, clean fuel, clean electricity and methane regulations plus huge government subsidies to Canada’s auto sector, to build electric vehicles and establish EV battery supply chains here.
(3) Trudeau’s quarterly climate action incentive payments mean most households paying the federal carbon tax (every province except B.C. and Quebec which have federally-approved carbon pricing plans) receive more in rebates than they pay in carbon taxes
True if you look only at dollars in and dollars out, but false according to independent, non-partisan parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux, who says when the damage the carbon tax does to the Canadian economy in terms of lowering incomes, reducing business investment and cutting economic growth is factored in, most households pay more in carbon taxes than they receive in rebates.
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(4) Carbon taxes will ensure Canada achieves its emission reduction targets for 2030
False. To achieve the target Canada will have to reduce emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. According to the latest government data, Canada’s emissions as of 2022 were 7.1% below 2005 levels and headed in the wrong direction because, in 2021, they were 8.4% below. Canada is so far behind meeting Trudeau’s target that it would take a series of global recessions on the scale of the one set off by the sub-prime mortgage derivative scandal of 2008-09, or the 2020 pandemic, to reduce global economic activity enough to meet Trudeau’s 2030 target. Even if we did, it would have no effect because Canada’s emissions, at 1.5% of the global total, are too small to materially impact climate change. Meanwhile, global emissions for 2024 are expected to be the highest on record when all the calculations are completed.
(5) Prime minister-in-waiting Mark Carney has promised to scrap Trudeau’s carbon tax
False, he’s replacing it with a new carbon tax which in some ways is worse than that of Trudeau. That’s because it will hide the costs of carbon pricing from consumers, eliminate carbon tax rebates and will be accompanied by a new carbon tax that will increase the cost of goods from many foreign countries.
(6) Wind and solar power are ready to replace energy produced by the burning of fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas
True, perhaps, someday, but false today because wind and solar power are only available when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Until batteries can store electricity at levels needed to sustain modern industrialized societies the dream of “net zero” emissions will remain a dream.
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