Tory filibuster turns up nothing on carbon tax
Ford pledges to ditch tax as first priority
OTTAWA • After a 12-hour filibuster that lasted through the night, the Conservatives ended their voting marathon on Friday morning, announcing they’d used “every tool” they have to force the Liberals to reveal the cost of their federal carbon tax.
But the procedural tactic seems to have brought the Liberals no closer to releasing the documents the Conservatives are demanding. In fact, its only tangible effect has been to delay House of Commons debate on several pieces of legislation, including the Liberals’ cannabis legalization bill, which the Conservatives oppose.
On Thursday, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said all the provinces must come up with their own carbon-pricing schemes, and it’s difficult to analyze household costs without knowing details of the provincial plans.
The federal government has given the provinces until September to provide those details. Any province that doesn’t come up with its own carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme will be subject to the federal carbon tax, which will start at $20 per tonne in 2019, rising to $50 per tonne in 2022.
Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia already have carbon pricing schemes in place, though Ontario premier-designate Doug Ford announced Friday that he plans to scrap his province’s cap-and-trade scheme and challenge the federal plan as soon as he takes office.
“Today, I want to confirm that in Ontario the carbon tax’s days are numbered,” he said. “In fact, upon the swearing in of my new cabinet at the top of our agenda, the very first item will be to pass an order to cancel the Liberal cap-and-trade carbon tax.”
Eliminating cap and trade will help deliver on a campaign promise to cut gasoline prices by 10 cents per litre, Ford said.
Shortly after exhausted MPs streamed out of the House of Commons around 10 a.m. on Friday, Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said he felt he’d made his point, despite the fact that the government hasn’t coughed up any new documents.
“Sometimes a non-answer is an answer,” he said. “And I think we were able to communicate loudly and clearly that the government has got something to hide.”
On Thursday, Poilievre tabled a motion demanding that the Liberals release all documents calculating the cost to households of the federal carbon pricing plan by June 22. When the Liberals defeated the motion, the Conservatives triggered a string of votes, starting at about 10:30 p.m., that forced the House to sit through the night as punishment. Though the voting could have continued for upwards of 25 hours, the Tories cut short their filibuster after 12 hours — just long enough so that no other business could be conducted in the House of Commons on Friday.
In April, the Liberals released a report estimating that a national carbon price could cut emissions by 80 to 90 million tonnes in 2022 without a significant impact on GDP, but the document doesn’t say how much households stand to be affected.
Poilievre’s motion was based in part on a government memo he obtained using access-to-information laws, which shows the finance department has analyzed the economic impacts of carbon pricing. The department’s findings were redacted. But that memo is dated Oct. 20, 2015, just one day after the Liberals were elected and long before they’d released the details of their carbon pricing plan. It’s unclear what cost analyses have been done since then. The government has calculated that a $50-per-tonne carbon tax will add about 11 cents to every litre of gasoline.