EDITORIAL: Finally, the truth on carbon tax impact

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The galling manner in which the late and unlamented government of Justin Trudeau misled Canadians over the carbon tax is only now being revealed.

This week’s report from Statistics Canada shows the annual rate of inflation for March slowed to 1.7%, down from 2.3% last March.

This is no surprise. You don’t have to have to be an economist to figure out that if you add a tax to the price of gasoline and natural gas, it will increase costs to individuals and cause hardships to those who need to drive anywhere or heat their homes — which is just about everyone in this vast, chilly country.

Despite quarterly payments made to taxpayers to offset carbon tax costs, last year the parliamentary budget officer estimated that households would be worse off by 2030-31, when the cumulative economic impact on the gross domestic product and investment income was factored in.

“Given that the fuel charge lowers employment and investment income, which makes up a larger share of total income for higher-income households, their net cost is higher,” Yves Giroux said in his report.

Meanwhile, those who suggested the carbon tax was hurting Canadians were dismissed as climate change heretics.

Trudeau labelled Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s concerns about how the carbon tax was fuelling inflation as “absolute nonsense.”

Yet, StatsCan has now etched in black and white just how right Poilievre was. Gas prices fell 18.1% year-over-year in April, thanks mostly to Prime Minister Mark Carney scrapping the carbon tax. Excluding energy from the consumer price index, StatsCan said inflation would have come in at 2.9% for April, an increase from 2.5% for the same figure from March. The only province that didn’t see a dip in inflation was Quebec, which has its own cap-and-trade system of carbon taxation, so it was not affected by the federal government ending the tax in other provinces.

It’s clear we were fed a whopper of a fib about the relationship between the carbon tax and inflation. And some gullible souls gobbled it up wholesale.

Carney may be a new face at the helm. His cabinet is padded with the same faces who inflicted the carbon tax on us and then misrepresented and distorted the impact it would have on inflation. Shame on them.