I’ve insisted on this forever, with however little effect. It is a tax on carbon dioxide, a life-giving, life-enhancing element of the air we breathe. Carbon dioxide is the source and vital energy of all our Earth’s plant life — “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” — in Dylan Thomas’ wonderful description of it.
Yet everywhere in the news and on every panel show that’s what it’s called and the Liberals oblige that confusion. They certainly never clarify it. And why would they? It’s lip gloss on the policy swine. Carbon reeks of coal and soot — pollutants. Carbon dioxide is not soot. The Liberals have put a tax on the air we breathe.
Second, the Liberals don’t even like to call it a tax. The phrase you hear and have heard from climate ministers and the green warrior himself, Justin Trudeau, is “putting a price on pollution.” You hear that phrase and you’re meant to think of tons of sewage pouring into some pristine lake or some dread chemical spill into a town’s drinking water.
Carbon dioxide is not sewage. Otherwise it would be very embarrassing for all of us every time we exhale. It is in no sense whatsoever a “tax on pollution.” That phrase is what the bull leaves with such malodorous abundance in the meadow every time he has serious stomach problems.
They won’t call the carbon tax what it is, they call it what it is not. You put another name on something only when you are, or should be, ashamed of it.
What other misspeaks, contradictions and evasions come with the carbon tax? Well, for one that it does anything. B.C. has had a carbon tax for 14 years — which by the way made it into general revenue despite all the holy vows that it would never do that. Has it lowered emissions? Is there any real, measurable way to tell if it did. Likewise all the provinces of Canada, yet not a single “climate target” has been met as a result.
The great talking point for the carbon tax was that eight out of 10 households would get back more than they pay in. That was a farce from the very beginning. Were it true it would be the most insane and stupid tax ever imagined. Name a tax that makes the taxpayer richer. What a strange incentive that would be. Half of Canada would be upping the thermostat, putting the air conditioner on in winter, and driving day and night to burn up oil and gas so that they could get more back than they put in.
But the Liberals, desperate to sell this senseless curb on growth and industry had to confect some moronic twist of logic and reality to justify it. They’re good at that. Think of bill C-11.
You’re not getting more back. The PBO has made that clear. Lorrie Goldstein of the Sun has for years pointed out it is not so and cannot be so. Let me quote Mr. Goldstein quoting the PBO: “When both fiscal & economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss.” Goldstein also cites the often seen video of Mr. Trudeau in full earnest voice “explicitly making the misleading and inaccurate claim climate action incentive payments leave eight out of 10 families paying the federal carbon tax better off financially.” Not so. Can’t be. Never will be. No tax makes the payee richer.
And over the weekend former Greenpeace stunt man, activist, scaler of towers, Steven Guilbeault himself, let the carbon tax feline out of the burlap bag in a CTV interview. Most households will pay more in than they will get back. Most. Will pay more. Said the famed abseiler in his eloquent way “if you do the average, yeah, it’s true, it’s going to cost more money to people.”
So there you have it. They can’t call it what it is — a tax on the source-agent of all lush life on earth from rain forests to Wordsworth’s “golden daffodils. They call it what it is not — a “price on pollution.” And they have to backtrack on their biggest, boldest, utterly brazen talking point — that “most people” will get more back.
What is the nature of this strange bunch in Ottawa? If they think, what are they thinking?
Here’s what the “carbon tax” is. A kick in the shins to Alberta. A depressant on the greatest source of the Canadian economy. A useless, unmeasurable money grab. Think of it this way. Canada’s carbon tax could work as China’s “carbon offset.” Every time Mr. Trudeau raises it, China can build 10 more coal mines. We are, in George Orwell’s use of the phrase “objectively” buying offsets for China’s grinding coal.
Speaking of coal, here’s a quiz. Name the (recent) B.C. Premier, who fought pipelines with a frenzy in the name of saving the planet who, now out of office, has taken a position on a B.C. coal company board. A coal company board! You cannot make this stuff up. The leather on the BC premier’s cabinet chair is still warm from his hindquarters, and John Horgan — “I’ll fight it with every tool in the tool box,” is now a coal mining director.
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