EDITORIAL: Canada’s history of carbon tax follies
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One thing the Trudeau government won’t be boasting about as Canada’s delegation heads to the United Nations’ annual global gabfest on climate change in Baku, Azerbaijan, is that after nine years in power, Canada has the worst record of any G7 country in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s worse than the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Japan and most significantly, the U.S., our largest trading partner, which has never had a national carbon tax, unlike Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau imposed one in 2019.
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According to a report by federal environment commissioner Jerry DeMarco last week, Canada’s emissions rose 14% from 1990 to 2021 and decreased by 8% from 2005 to 2021, while U.S. emissions decreased by 2% from 1990 to 2021 and by 15% from 2005 to 2021,
With president-elect Donald Trump taking office on Jan. 20, it’s a given the U.S. won’t impose a national carbon tax on American industries and may pull out of the UN’s 2015 Paris climate agreement, as he did the first time he was president.
By contrast, Trudeau’s carbon tax, which increased the cost of gasoline, home heating fuel and 20 other forms of fossil fuel energy, started at $20 per tonne of emissions in 2019.
Today it’s $80 per tonne, rising to $95 per tonne on April 1, 2025 and will continue increasing annually until 2030 when it hits $170 per tonne.
The Trudeau government says this will help Canada reduce its emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030.
But that’s unlikely given that, as of 2022, the last year for which government data are available, Canada’s emissions were just 7.1% below 2005 levels. This means the Trudeau government has achieved just 17.8% of its minimum target of a 40% reduction in nine years and now has just six to achieve the remaining 82.8%.
In the real world, Canada will always have high per-capita emissions because we’re the coldest and second-largest country on earth with a small population and a resource-based economy.
The question the Trudeau government should answer is why Canada has a national carbon tax when our largest trading partner doesn’t — and has a better record of reducing emissions than us.
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