Federal Liberals who argue they’ve put their vote-killing carbon tax controversy behind them, because their leading contenders for the party leadership are suggesting they’ll replace it with something else, are engaged in wishful thinking on steroids.
Equally unrealistic are claims by Liberal spin doctors and consultants, who argue Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is in trouble because his entire election campaign was to be based on “axing the tax” and now the Liberals have killed it as an issue.
This, they argue, because whoever wins the race — previous fervent carbon tax supporters Mark Carney or Chrystia Freeland — will not be advocating for the carbon tax when Canadians go to the polls.
These arguments are disingenuous and ridiculous.
First, Carney and Freeland, other than in vague, general terms, have yet to explain what will replace the carbon tax.
Once you put a tax on people to pay for something they were previously not taxed for — in this case the emission of industrial greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — Canadians as consumers and taxpayers will be on the hook for it no matter what you call it.
A cynic might argue that whatever the Liberals are saying about killing the carbon tax today, they’ve lied so many times about the issue in the past that any promises they make today should be treated with the utmost skepticism.
The biggest lie the Liberals told us was that they would freeze their carbon tax at $50 per tonne of emissions. It’s now $80 per tonne, scheduled to increase to $95 per tonne on April 1, on its way through future annual hikes to $170 per tonne on April 1, 2030.
The Liberals who make these false arguments clearly don’t understand their carbon tax is but one of 149 measures costing the public more than $200 billion the Trudeau Liberals have earmarked, ostensibly, to lower emissions.
That’s because they also don’t understand their campaign to cut emissions is primarily an economic policy intended to reshape society and much more than an environmental policy.
Included in this plan are new regulations to reduce emissions, aimed primarily at Canada’s oil and gas sector, methane regulations, clean fuel regulations, clean electricity regulations, an industrial carbon tax and government subsidies to the private sector to help finance so-called clean energy industries, such as the domestic manufacture of electric vehicles and EV batteries.
The Liberals have yet to explain what they plan to do about all of these programs beyond the consumer fuel charge now that, at the eleventh hour, they are backing away from their carbon tax, however vaguely.
Indeed critics of carbon pricing rightly point out that it is only effective when the price is high enough to replace government regulations and subsidies, as opposed to what the Trudeau government did which was to layer its carbon tax on top of new government regulations and subsidies.
Unless the Liberals are prepared to explain how they will reform all of these policies, in addition to scrapping the consumer carbon tax, which is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to costs, everything else they say on the subject will amount to nothing more than a bait-and-switch tactic.
The same questions need to be answered by Poilievre, given that his “axe the tax” campaign is a slogan, rather than a serious explanation of what a Conservative government would do with the hundreds of billions of public dollars the Liberals are spending on this file.