EDITORIAL: Carbon taxes are the new snake oil

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For people who still believe Liberal leadership frontrunner Mark Carney has promised to scrap the Liberals’ carbon tax, we have some ocean-front property in Alberta we’d like to sell them.

Or perhaps they’d prefer to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Those trying to convince Canadians of this highly misleading statement are Liberal MPs, Liberal strategists, and liberal media apologists.

What should that tell us?

Carney isn’t scrapping Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax, his claim is he’s changing it to make it better.

In fact, as the Conservatives have pointed out in a highly effective video citing his own words, Carney, one of the world’s leading corporate missionaries for global carbon taxes, thinks they should be much higher than they are.

A leopard like that isn’t going to change his spots when he comes for our wallets.

Carney’s proposed reforms are, in several ways, worse than Trudeau’s carbon tax — aka the federal fuel charge.

Unlike Trudeau’s plan where it was easy to determine the impact of his carbon tax on necessities such as natural gas and gasoline, Carney intends to bury those costs in the other half of Trudeau’ carbon tax scheme.

That’s an industrial cap-and-trade system for large emitters which raises the prices of consumer goods rather than the taxes on them.

Carney has even praised the merits of a “shadow” carbon price.

When people tell you what they believe, believe them.

Carney’s claim his reformed carbon tax will hit only big polluters is nonsense.

All costs of carbon pricing, whether through higher taxes or higher prices on consumer goods, are eventually paid by the public.

Carney’s plan, at least what we know of it, also gives Canadians less choice about what they buy.

Rather than the rebate system which was based on household size, Carney proposes for the federal government to determine what consumer purchases deserve to be subsidized as low-carbon and which ones don’t.

Same goes for the industries producing those goods.

The “coup de grâce” is that Carney would also impose a new carbon tax — a tariff on imported goods produced in other countries in cases where our federal government decides they aren’t doing enough to fight climate change.

That would increase the cost of these goods to Canadians.

Brooklyn Bridge, anyone?

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