A CARBON INCENTIVE TO VOTE LIBERAL.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the all-new Canadian Cynical Circular Carbon Circus, the amazing Liberal climate control spectacle that will send you on a great environmental ride into the future.

Come on in! We will pay you to not consume fossil fuels — as individuals and as industries. It’s an economic revolution that takes us beyond blockchain and cryptocurrencies and cannabis into a brave new universe in which money goes round and round and everybody wins. We will pay Canadians with their own money — more than $20 billion over five years in carbon taxes that will raise the price of gasoline by 11 cents a litre by 2022, and ever higher thereafter if not sooner. Everybody pays and everybody wins, except for those who don’t. And some people win more than they pay. It’s better than a lottery!

For the people of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, the federal carbon circus cash comes via a new “Climate Action Incentive Payment.” An Ontario family of four will receive $307 for this year, the amount to be claimed on 2018 income tax returns. A Saskatchewan family will get a Climate Action Incentive Payment of $609.

What’s the Climate Action Incentive Payment for? The Liberal plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna Tuesday doesn’t specify. What are taxpayers in the four provinces being incented to do, exactly, with this new wad of free cash? There is only one explanation: Vote Liberal in 2019!

The payments are based on a 2019 carbon price of $20 a tonne, rising to $50 by 2022. As the carbon tax goes up, Ontario families will receive $718 in 2022 and Saskatchewan families $1,459. And there will be more to come, presumably, since the latest doomsday scenario from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the font of all speculation and data manipulation on climate issues —warned that by 2030 (only 12 years from now) a carbon price of somewhere between $135 to $5,500 per tonne would be needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

At US$5,500, Ottawa’s new carbon tax/price/incentive/disincentive could by

2030 hypothetically end up transferring tens of thousands of dollars a year to each Canadian family. That’s not going to happen, of course. But even a carbon tax that rises to a relatively modest $400 or $500 a tonne — equal to a $1 increase in the price of gasoline and believed by Nobelists and other economists to be the minimum required to actually promote reductions in use of fossil fuels — implies (at current consumption rates) annual federal carbon-tax revenues of $100 billion a year and Liberal incentive payments of at least $6,000 to individual Canadian families. Or maybe the carbon tax is just the Liberal plan to get out from under their deficits.

Forecasts released Tuesday by Ottawa show total revenue from the carbon tax over five years to exceed $20 billion. A recent C.D. Howe Institute study estimated that a version of the federal carbon tax backstop at $20 a tonne would generate $5.2 billion in 2019, implying potential total tax take over five years of more than $25 billion, and rising as the price of carbon increases.

The Liberal idea under Trudeau is to rebrand carbon, the foundation of all life on earth, as “pollution” based on the theory that human-caused emissions of carbon are dramatically altering the planet and make it uninhabitable.

Justification for turning the Canadian and world economy into a state-planned system comes mostly through alarmist claims that temperatures are rising, the weather is worsening, hurricanes are stronger.

To reinforce this point, the new Liberal carbon-tax plan regurgitates the insurance industry’s dubious claim that “The cost of property damages from climate change averaged $405 million per year between 1983 and 2008, but have risen dramatically to $1.8 billion a year since 2009. That number is expected to grow as high as $43 billion by 2050.” Even that last number, however, seems like a small cost compared with the looming hundreds of billions associated with the carbon tax system.

But it is hard to believe Canada’s carbon-tax circus will survive that long.

Behind the façade of the vote-buying carbon-incentive payment stands a monumental plan to overturn the Canadian economy and install some kind of economic fantasy island where the government engineers growth and development through massive transfers of value and opportunity from one industry and economic sector to another, through regulation, subsidies and other economic shenanigans.

For reasons that are beyond the scope of this column, bank economists and academics are being joined by gullible business leaders who — spooked by fear of bad publicity — are lining up like lemmings. They’re all jumping to join the circus in support of plans that can only disrupt the economy and undermine the welfare of all Canadians.

WHAT ARE TAXPAYERS IN THE FOUR PROVINCES BEING INCENTED TO DO, EXACTLY, WITH THIS NEW WAD OF FREE CASH?