National Post (National Edition)
Time for Liberals to come clean on carbon tax.
The federal government seems to be saying even less than they know about carbon taxes. Which can’t be easy.
It’s a signature policy they insist will work. But they are exploiting a hard-won reputation for cluelessness on key promises from electoral reform to marijuana legalization to convince us they have no idea how this one would function either. For instance, on April 30, Finance Minister Bill Morneau flatly refused to tell the Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women whether the government had even done a gender-based analysis on the carbon tax. Or, more precisely, he flatly refused to acknowledge that Conservative MP Michelle Rempel kept asking him that question.
His performance was so patronizingly evasive it would make an ideal satirical “mansplaining” video for workplace sensitivity training; starting with announcing he had to be somewhere important soon, so make it snappy. And there are really only two possibilities. Either he knew whether they had done the analysis and wasn’t saying, or didn’t know and wasn’t admitting it. Either way it was deeply weird given the hoo-hah this administration has made about GBA.
Plot-spoiler alert: CTV reported that same day that “a recent order paper question found Environment and Climate Change Canada has indeed put carbon pricing to the gender test — and found the impacts differ, depending on the system and how the revenue is used. The order paper response, which is similar to an access-to-information request for MPs, said the gender analysis was undertaken in 2016 and later updated in 2017.”
If Morneau was pretending not to know, he’s far more ready for prime time than the finance portfolio because he sure looked dopey. And it was no isolated incident. At the Commons Standing Committee on Finance three days later, he told Tory finance critic Pierre Poilievre to go fish on what a carbon tax would cost Canadians, claiming it wouldn’t be known until September when the provinces produce their detailed plans. He also said it would be zero because the feds would give it all back to the provinces.
These parrot-like talking points are absurd. There’s no reason to assume provinces would or even could return any rebate from a federal carbon tax to those who paid it penny for penny. And if they did, it would defeat the whole purpose of changing our behaviour by raising its cost. The claim is also brazenly untrue, because on April 30 Environment Minister Catherine McKenna tweeted smugly, “Our analysis shows that a price on carbon pollution would reduce emissions equivalent to taking every car in Canada off the road for a year.”
I’m no fan of econometrics. I suspect any such analysis would be guesswork dressed in mathematical garb. But clearly they have a study that purports to know how much Canadians would change our behaviour and therefore necessarily how much we would pay for the behaviour we didn’t change. (And in fact they’ve given Poilievre a copy with the numbers blacked out.)
Unless our finance minister has simply lost the ability to hide his disdain for the parliamentarians we elect, the most probable explanation for the Liberals’ dance of the seven vagues is that they have a cost estimate they don’t like. But if they think we won’t find out before the next election, they’d better get marijuana legalized fast because sobriety is doing nothing for their judgment.
As CBC noted of Morneau brushing Poilievre off, “The Liberal government has argued that putting a price on carbon has a low cost and a big impact.” Which again is absurd since they’re trying to force us, within mere decades, to abandon the primary energy source underpinning our way of life.
If the climate alarmists are right, we must do so regardless of resulting pain. But there’s something more than usually fantastical in suggesting we could do anything remotely equivalent to taking every car in Canada off the road for a year and not feel a sharp pinch. (If their theory is we’re doing a lot of pointless driving, home heating or cooking they might want to look at the tens of thousands of excess winter deaths in Britain due partly to expensive energy.)
Here’s what I think Morneau & Co. should really say: “We can’t calculate what a carbon tax will cost because the economy is far too complicated. Ideally it won’t be huge. But we are absolutely committed to a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, so we will keep raising the tax until you stop burning fossil fuels or else vote us out, because we’re convinced Earth needs it. We hope you are, too.”
If they said that, they’d get a lot of credit for honesty … from me. Others might be startled and displeased. But however it played out, they couldn’t look stupider than they currently do.
PROBABLE ... THEYHAVEA COST ESTIMATE THEY DON’T LIKE.