Contrary to spin-doctoring by Liberal politicians, consultants and aides, it bears repeating Liberal leadership front runner Mark Carney has not promised to scrap the Liberals’ carbon tax if he wins that race and becomes prime minister.
Rather, he is turning the previously transparent consumer fuel charge — which raises the cost of gasoline, natural gas and 20 other forms of fossil fuel energy every year — into a hidden tax for large industrial emitters of greenhouse gases.
Known as the output based pricing system, this is a cap-and-trade scheme — another form of a carbon tax because it raises prices on consumer goods and services rather than the taxes imposed on them.
Because prices are influenced by many factors, it becomes much more difficult to figure out what portion was uniquely caused by carbon pricing as businesses pass along their increased costs to customers.
But wait, there’s more.
Another part of Carney’s plan is for the Canadian government to impose tariffs on Canadian families when they buy goods and services from foreign countries the federal government deems are not doing enough to fight climate change.
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Called the “carbon border adjustment mechanism”,
Carney argues it will promote “fair competition and improve environmental outcomes” designed to “better economically integrate Canada with allies” in the fight against climate change.
In reality, it does nothing of the sort.
Rather, it was designed to have Canadian families pay more for goods and services through tariffs imposed on foreign imports by their own government, ostensibly to prevent so-called “carbon leakage”.
Carbon leakage occurs when companies relocate their operations from countries with strict carbon pricing regimes to ones with weaker regulations or none at all.
Carbon border adjustment mechanisms can also be used to pay rebates to Canadian companies, exporting goods and services to other countries judged to have less stringent or non-existent regulations compared to Canada.
As a final act of big brotherism, the federal government, instead of giving rebates to Canadian households based on family size, will determine which consumer purchases for things such as heat pumps, home insulation and electric cars, are worthy of rebates to the public.
Bottom line: While it’s hard to believe, the Liberals have created a new system to collect carbon taxes which is worse than the one it replaced.