GOLDSTEIN: Liberal media jump on board 'Team Carney' campaign

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Let’s begun by debunking the myth – aided and abetted by the liberal media – that Prime Minister Mark Carney killed carbon pricing on Friday through a cabinet decree.

The most egregious example of this was buried in a CBC report on Thursday that Carney was “once a proponent of carbon pricing” implying he no longer is, which is an example of media disinformation of the type CBC is constantly warning us about.

It means the state-funded broadcaster either doesn’t understand what carbon pricing is, or is fully on board “Team Carney” when it comes to the rapidly approaching federal election, as Carney, the world’s pre-eminent corporate lobbyist and booster of carbon taxes – who previously complained they weren’t high enough – attempts to convince Canadians he no longer believes in them.

Indeed, Carney and the Liberals must be overjoyed that on Friday most of the mainstream media joined the Team Carney campaign when they reported that Carney, through cabinet decree, had killed the “consumer carbon tax” in his first act as prime minister, without explaining what that means.

When Carney announced his intentions for the consumer carbon tax on Jan. 31, even the Carney campaign appeared confused about what it was doing.

The headline on the press release didn’t say Carney was killing the consumer carbon tax, as so obediently reported by most media on Friday.

What it said was: “Mark Carney presents plan for change on consumer carbon tax” while the text said, a “Mark Carney-led government will immediately remove the consumer carbon tax and instead, create a system of incentives to reward Canadians for making greener choices …”

We don’t yet know how Carney’s new “system” will work – other than that it will fold the consumer carbon tax into what Carney says will be an “improved and tightened” industrial carbon tax known as the Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS) for large, industrial emitters that he will extend by five years until 2035.

According to Carney – and again the details have yet to be released – this new system will target “big polluters” without any explanation so far of how it will prevent them from passing along their increased costs to the public in higher prices because of the increased production costs they will face.

On the face of it, Carney’s plan for the consumer carbon tax is to turn it into a hidden tax compared to what the Liberals used to refer to not as the “consumer carbon tax” but as the “fuel charge rates” to Canadian households for 22 forms of fossil fuel energy, including gasoline and natural gas.

Fuel charge rates were scheduled to increase April 1 when Canada’s carbon price was set to increase by 18.75% from $80 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions to $95 per tonne, on the way to $170 per tonne in 2030.

That would have increased the cost of gasoline by 20.91 cents per litre and natural gas by 18.11 cents per cubic metre since the inception of the fuel charge in 2019, but Carney announced Friday that increase is being cancelled while Canadians will receive one final carbon tax rebate payment on that day as well.

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That suggests there will be no rebates under whatever new system Carney comes up with to replace the consumer carbon tax.

In addition, it will no longer be possible for the public to track how consumer carbon pricing is impacting the cost of gasoline, natural gas and other forms of fossil fuel energy because consumer prices are affected by numerous factors, of which carbon pricing is only one.

So, Carney’s new carbon pricing system will apparently be less transparent than the one he’s replacing, where the annual costs of consumer carbon pricing were publicly available on government websites.

In addition, Carney plans to create a new carbon tax known as a “carbon border adjustment mechanism.”

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This is a new tariff to be imposed on Canadians when they purchase imported goods coming from other countries that, in the view of the Carney government, do not have strong climate change policies.

While we don’t know how that will work – again, the Carney campaign says the details are to come – it should be noted that the U.S., unlike Canada, does not have a national carbon price.

In addition, President Donald Trump has, unlike Canada, announced he is withdrawing the U.S. from the UN’s Paris climate accord and is scrapping many of the so-called green energy initiatives and subsides introduced by the previous Joe Biden administration.

This raises the question of whether Carney’s new “border adjustment mechanism” will apply to U.S. goods imported into Canada, raising their costs to Canadian consumers.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com