EDITORIAL: Brace for new carbon taxes if Carney wins

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It’s appropriate that the Liberals’ consumer carbon tax ended on April Fools’ Day, because anyone who thinks Mark Carney and the Liberals winning the April 28 election means the end of paying carbon taxes is a fool. 

Carney will fold the consumer carbon tax into, in his words, an “improved and tightened” industrial carbon tax known as the Output-Based Pricing System, where, in the real world, its costs will be hidden from the public. 

Carney says his new system — details to come — will only target “big polluters” while incentivizing consumers and industry to lower their carbon footprints. 

That’s quite the claim given that, in any carbon pricing system the public, either as consumers or taxpayers, ends up paying the added costs and Carney, the world’s leading corporate spokesman for carbon taxes, has always said they are too low. 

Carney will also introduce a new carbon tax called a carbon border adjustment mechanism — a tariff on imported goods paid for by Canadian consumers if a re-elected Liberal government determines their country of origin is not doing enough to address climate change. 

The good, if temporary news, is that the end of the consumer carbon tax Tuesday — credit unrelenting political pressure applied by Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives on this issue — reduces the cost of gasoline by 17.6 cents per litre, or $8.80 per fill-up, for a 50-litre tank. 

The cost of natural gas used for home heating will decrease by 15.25 cents per cubic metre, along with price decreases in 20 other forms of fossil fuel energy, except in Quebec which has its own federally-approved pricing system. 

Under Carney’s carbon pricing plan, as far as we know, there will no longer be rebates save for a final one scheduled for later this month. 

By contrast, Poilievre and the Conservatives have promised to scrap both the Liberals’ consumer and industrial carbon taxes, so the only way Canadians can get rid of them will be to elect a Conservative government on April 28. 

As for years of rhetoric by the Liberals that anyone who opposed their national carbon tax was willing to let the planet burn, the U.S. has lowered its emissions at twice the rate of Canada without a national carbon tax.