Well, it’s toast, or about as toast as we’re gonna get without having the actual toast in hand.
Ding-dong, the witch is dead.
The witch I speak of is the Carbon Tax, perhaps the most hated thing to waft through the Canadian consciousness since, well, the Carbon Tax. Or maybe the GST, but that’s still with us thirty-five years after it was going to be scrapped, which is what we do here in Canada when we don’t like something, we scrap it.
Scrap gives the impression of something cast away in disgust, almost as if garbage, almost as if we’re absolutely disgusted with it. We can’t just get rid of it, or replace it, or make it better somehow. In Canada, we scrap things.
Pierre Poilievre, more than anyone, can take credit for this, so give credit where credit is due. At least when he sets out to scrap something, as in a tax on carbon, the only thing that suffers damage is the environment. Doug Ford’s anti-carbon levy campaign has cost Ontarians the same environmental price, but also millions of dollars in losses to go along with it.
But it’s not just Conservatives now, it’s Liberals too. The two front-runners for the Liberal leadership. Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have both indicated that they will discontinue to Carbon Tax is they’re successful at replacing Justin Trudeau.
So I guess that’s that.
Too bad there was absolutely nothing wrong with this tax, which was revenue-neutral and the farthest thing from a money grab of the federal government. In fact, with the reimbursement portion of the program often costing more that the money taken in, the program tended to operate at a loss. And that’s not, nor was it ever, a bad thing. This tax wasn’t intended to make money for the government. It was intended to get Canadians to burn less carbon.
I’ll not go into an incredible amount of exhaustive explaining and detail here, because you’re more than likely to dismiss it or ignore it because it may be inconvenient to your current thinking. Fair enough.
But at its simplest, a consumer filling his/her tank with gas would have the tax levied upon them. At some point in the same calendar year, that same purchaser of gasoline would receive that money back in the form f a federal government cheque, plus money for all the other times they paid the tax while filling up.
So, at the end of the day, the tax likely cost you not a single red Canadian cent, and quite likely resulted in you getting more back from the government than you paid out in the form of the Carbon Tax.
So what’s the point then? Hamsters on a wheel, right?
Except it’s not that at all. If the prospect of paying that tax caused you to change your motoring plans just once, and you multiply that by the number of driving Canadians there are, then you’ve just witnessed a profound reduction in the amount of carbon being released into the environment. That’s if it changed your plans just once, in a year. If the tax caused you to change your plans more than once, then that’s just more carbon prevented from polluting the air we breathe. Multiplied by the number of driving Canadians again.
If your driving habits were influenced quite a bit as a result of the tax, and you did stuff like walked, biked, car pooled, or public transited where possible, then the cheque you get back from the government as a rebate would be a net plus for you, as in you’d make money from it. Think of it as your reward for doing your bit for the environment.
The only people who wouldn’t benefit are people who have a large carbon footprint due to their heavy use of motor vehicles or their disregard for the realities of climate change and climate degradation. And honestly, why would I care about these types? These are the folks that are the real problem, people who absolutely refuse to be “told” anything that serves as a disconnect to the way they carry on with their vehicle habits.
We, in Ontario, didn’t even have to pay the stupid tax because Ontario was part of a three-way cap and trade with Quebec and California that worked splendidly to reduce Ontario’s carbon emissions and place the cost of environmental degradation on the industrial concerns who do most of the polluting.
But Gunslinger Doug came along and trashed that deal, because, well, it had something to do with the environment, and environmental compromise is not something Conservatives like to open their eyes to, so he got rid of it because of that and the fact that he wanted to get rid of anything authored by his predecessor, Kathleen Wynne.
And when he was done with this little piece of political pettiness, it automatically triggered the federal Carbon Tax, as all provinces are required to have some scheme in place to reach carbon elimination targets.
Way to go, Doug. Good one.
Luckily, a second-best policy, that being the federal Carbon Tax, existed that we here in Ontario could fall back on. Except Doug had to declare war on that too, because he got a sense of its unpopularity, fanned all along by Conservative politicians. So he spent millions of dollars on stickers for gas pumps, with one-sided messaging, and the awkward reality that the bloody things didn’t stick on the pumps.
Way to go, Doug. Good one.
None of it matters anymore. With everyone lining up to scrap the tax, or axe the tax, or crank the tank, or spank the crank, or whatever silly little slogan may come to mind, we’re now in a time where we have no official government policy to deal with excessive carbon emissions.
Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump is a place out west where the indigenous peoples herded buffalo over a cliff so as to make it easier to hunt the big lugs. And year after year, herd after herd, these dim-witted creatures would follow their ancestors to certain doom by following the guy in front of them without question.
It’s tough to watch Canadian voters take a similar path sometimes on critical issues like climate and the environment.
COVER PHOTO: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
NEWSMAGRENFREW 