LILLEY: Liberals lied on the carbon tax, according to Statistics Canada data

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When the House of Commons was last sitting in December — some five months ago — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre raised the issue of the carbon tax and inflation. Then Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau called Poilievre’s statements “absolute nonsense” and dismissed the idea that the carbon tax and inflation were connected.

It’s what they had been doing since introducing the consumer carbon tax in 2018. They really wanted you to believe that increasing the cost of everything with a tax on carbon wouldn’t raise prices and that you would be better off.

“The price decrease in April was mainly driven by the removal of the consumer carbon price,” Statistics Canada announced Tuesday morning, while reporting inflation fell from 2.3% in March to 1.7% in April.

The agency noted that the fall in crude oil prices also played a role but put most of the inflation drop on the carbon tax rate being reduced to zero. Despite claims otherwise, the carbon tax remains in place, they just don’t charge it on the consumer side, though the Carney government says they will introduce legislation to remove it.

“Eight out of 10 Canadians are better off with the Canada carbon rebate than the price on pollution costs them,” Trudeau was fond of telling the House of Commons.

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Of course, he ignored several reports, including from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, that when the total cumulative effect of the carbon tax was taken into account, most families were paying more – far more – than they did without the tax, even when accounting for rebates. So, too, did the Liberals ignore the compounding impact of a carbon price being added to supply chains when it came to the final price.

They wanted you to ignore that the greenhouse tomato grown in Manotick or Leamington would have a carbon tax added on for the natural gas released into the greenhouse even though that CO2 was absorbed by the plants to allow them to grow. The Liberals wanted you to ignore that the truck that would pick up the tomato and take them to the wholesaler would pay the carbon tax on the gas used to transport them, as would the truck taking them to the store.

Retailers selling you that tomato would be paying the carbon tax on the lighting, the heating for their stores, and the refrigeration for their products. At every turn, every step of the economic process, that Canadian-grown tomato would face an incremental and compounded carbon tax, but the Liberals denied it.

You know what didn’t have a carbon tax applied to it, a tomato from California or Mexico.

Sadly, despite using food as the example here, food inflation didn’t drop in April and instead rose from a 3.2% increase in March to 3.8% last month. Canadian food inflation is higher than that of the United States, but the Liberals want you to ignore that, just like they wanted you to ignore the inflationary aspects of the carbon tax and simply believe that everything is great.

Fresh vegetables are up 3.7% year-to-year; eggs, up 3.9%; fresh fruits, up 5%; and meat products, up 5.8% — though beef is up 16.5% compared to a year ago.

Like with the carbon tax, we can expect the new Carney Liberal government will try to tell us that we’ve never had it so good. Sure, their policies are one of the major reasons that food inflation is nearly double the current American rate, but Canada is doing just great, elbows up and all.

The Statistics Canada data proves one thing: the Liberal claim that their carbon tax wasn’t making your life more expensive was never true, and neither were the rest of their carbon tax claims.