Trudeau keeps lid on real carbon pricing

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government treats the public like mushrooms when it comes to the financial impact of carbon pricing on them.

That is, it keeps them in the dark and covers them in manure.

If it didn’t, it wouldn’t have taken an access to information application by the federal Conservatives to blast basic data out of the Liberal government that Canadians have a right to know, since it’s going to directly impact their cost of living.

That is, that Environment Canada secretly advised Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna in November 2015 that Canada will need a carbon price of $100 per tonne by 2020, and up to $300 per tonne by 2050, to meet federal short-term and mid-term greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

This as opposed to Trudeau’s program setting a minimum national carbon price of $10 per tonne starting next year, rising to $50 per tonne in 2022, although several provinces are ahead of that pace.

This previously secret advice to McKenna reveals how expensive it is for a big, cold, sparsely populated, resource-based, industrialized nation like Canada to lower emissions.

Remember, these amounts of a $100 per tonne carbon price by 2022 and $300 by 2050, are considered necessary to hit the emission reduction targets of the previous Harper government.

The Trudeau government never changed those targets, despite denouncing them as inadequate when they were in opposition, and claiming they would be the “floor” on which the Liberals would presumably improve after they became the government.

All Canadians will pay these costs, either in the form of higher taxes (carbon tax) or prices (cap and trade) on almost all goods and services.

The enormity of the carbon price increases being advised demonstrates why it is vital that all the revenue raised by governments through carbon pricing is returned to Canadians in the form of equal tax cuts or dividend payments.

Without revenue neutrality, all carbon pricing does is induce a recession, where emissions fall only because people have less money to spend.

Despite this the Trudeau Liberals have not made revenue neutrality a mandatory aspect of carbon pricing, meaning that for most provincial governments it will simply be a cash grab.

The Trudeau government doesn’t want you knowing that, either