EDITORIAL: Carney isn’t killing the carbon tax

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Liberal leader and prime minister-designate Mark Carney is leading Canadians down the garden path on the Liberals’ carbon tax, aided and abetted by reports claiming he will scrap it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

What he actually says he is going to do is to fold Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fuel charge (a.k.a. the “consumer carbon tax” on 22 forms of fossil fuel energy, including gasoline and natural gas) into an “improved and tightened” existing cap-and-trade regime covering large industrial emitters, known as the output-based pricing system (OBPS).

Cap and trade is a carbon tax by another name, although less visible to the public.

It raises the prices we pay for goods created using fossil fuel energy — meaning almost everything —as opposed to the carbon tax which increases taxes on them.

Carney insists this new system — details to come — will make “big polluters” pay while rewarding Canadians for buying low-carbon goods, but he has yet to explain why the “big polluters” won’t pass on their increased costs to Canadians under his system, which does not include rebates.

He has also said he is going to “extend the OBPS framework” by five years — to 2035 as opposed to 2030 — when the federal carbon price is scheduled to hit $170 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s up from $80 per tonne today, which is also scheduled to rise by 18.75% to $95 per tonne on April 1 under the current Liberal pricing system.

That will increase the cost of gasoline by 20.91¢ per litre and the cost of natural gas by 18.11¢ per cubic metre since Trudeau introduced his carbon tax in 2019.

Carney, one of the corporate world’s most vocal advocates for carbon taxes, has repeatedly praised Trudeau’s carbon tax in the past, except for the fact that, in his view, it wasn’t high enough.

Carney is also proposing a second carbon tax called a carbon border adjustment mechanism. This is a tariff a Carney-led Liberal government would impose on imported goods that Canadians would have to pay if, in the view of the government, they’re coming from countries that aren’t doing enough to fight climate change.

Carney’s not killing Trudeau’s carbon taxation regime — he’s expanding it.

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