It seems as if Liberal leadership frontrunners Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland both realize they won’t save their party in the next election unless they take Pierre Poilievre’s advice and “axe the tax.”
The highly unpopular carbon tax, that is.
So what will these Liberals replace the carbon tax with? Umm, another carbon tax.
Carney seems committed to finding the unicorn of all taxes — one that’s environmentally sound, lucrative for governments and consumers and attracts scads of investment in Canada.
(Maybe we should dub Carney’s carbon tax replacement the ‘fantasy tax’ or the ‘impossible tax’ or the ‘never-in-a-million-years tax’.)
On the other hand, Freeland said she would scrap the consumer carbon tax (which is good) and replace it “with a system that will work within our federation and will be developed collaboratively with provinces and territories.”
Let’s call this the ‘good-luck-with-that tax’.
Half the provinces rejected devising their own carbon tax back in 2019. Those provinces have reluctantly accepted the imposition of Ottawa’s version. However, four of them sued the feds over the tax because they felt it was an unconstitutional intrusion by Ottawa into provincial jurisdiction.
But who knows? Perhaps Freeland possesses a wand she can brandish to achieve such magical cooperation.
Neither Carney nor Freeland will give up on the idea of some sort of punishing carbon price aimed at coercing Canadians to use less fossil fuel. They still want to make you pay more for the carbon you emit to encourage you to emit less. They simply know that calling something a carbon tax is a political non-starter, so call it something else.
Carney’s is the more unbelievable promise.
In the lead-up to his campaign kickoff in Edmonton on Thursday, Carney said he would replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax with one that was more efficient, more effective and would attract billions in investment to our country.
To economists such as Carney, “more efficient” is usually code for “raises more money.” More effective, in the case of carbon taxes, means one that reduces more emissions than the current version (which has done little to stop carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere). Meanwhile, the notion of attracting more investment and creating more jobs via taxation is self-contradictory.
No such tax exists or could exist. Carney, in his most recent appointments as United Nations climate ambassador and chairman of a “green” investment fund, has had to convince himself it’s possible to transition the industrialized world to a carbon-free economy without trillions in tax-funded subsidies and without displacing millions of workers.
It’s not. But if you have spent the last few years surrounded by other fantasy believers, it’s easy to convince yourself that an all-things-to-all-people carbon tax replacement is doable and could be wildly popular with voters, consumers and environmentalists, too.
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The proposals of Freeland and Carney show the Liberals are so arrogant that they never give up on an idea, not even a bad one.
Coupled with the fact Carney’s campaign is being advised by many of Trudeau’s closest advisers, it’s possible to see him as the heir to Trudeau, minus the charisma.
I would trace the moment at which Kamala Harris lost last November’s U.S. presidential election to an interview she gave on CBS’s 60 Minutes. When asked if there was anything the administration of President Joe Biden had done in four years that she would have changed, the vice-president seemed to ponder for a second before replying that she wouldn’t have changed a thing.
From that moment on, she became the standard-bearer for every unpopular policy of the Biden years.
With their proposals to merely change the name of the carbon tax, but not the substance, Freeland and Carney may be similarly tying themselves to Trudeau’s legacy.