Small, medium businesses to get federal help on carbon pricing
OTTAWA The federal government expects to spend nearly $1.5 billion helping small and medium-sized businesses adapt to carbon pricing over the next five years — but it will not exempt them from the new carbon tax regime.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the government is no longer allowing anyone in Canada to pollute for free but that there will be supports to help small businesses adapt by making their operations more energy efficient.
“Whether one is a trucker, a farmer or a small-business owner, an environmentalist or a child, we are all paying the cost of climate change right now,” McKenna said Friday.
Small and medium-sized businesses will pay the carbon price on their energy input costs — $20 a tonne in 2019, rising by $10 a year until it hits $50 a tonne in 2022. Big industrial emitters are exempt from paying it on the energy they consume. Instead the government has set an emissions cap, based on 80 to 90 per cent of the average emissions in a specific industrial sector. Big companies will pay the tax only on their emissions above that cap.
The federal Liberals are in the final stages of implementing their 2015 campaign promise to introduce a national carbon price. On Tuesday the government said six provinces and all three territories either have their own carbon price systems that meet federal standards or opted to use some or all of the federal option.
Four provinces — Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick — that didn’t meet federal requirements will have the federal system imposed on them. About $2.3 billion will be raised from the levy in 2019-20, 90 per cent of which is being rebated to households via income tax returns.
The other 10 per cent will be funnelled into a program to help smaller businesses and other organizations that can’t pass the levy on via higher prices. Details of how that will be done are not yet finished but some sort of energy efficiency program seems to be in consideration.