It’s just another punitive tax grab

Dear editor: There is no legislated connection between carbon taxes and carbon reduction. It’s another punitive tax grab and a new revenue stream for government which has been soft soaped under the appealing label of saving the planet. Nations of sheep are easily fleeced by governments of wolves.

The Liberals want an incremental carbon tax, eventually rising to $100 per ton, to atone for our sins. That’s around $1206 per household annually. So much for tax cuts for the middle class.

They claim it’s revenue neutral, whatever that bafflegab means. If you pay a tax and don’t get anything back, how is that neutral? If they’re going to collect tax and then give it back to us, why set up a bureaucracy to administer it? After paying B.C. carbon taxes for 10 years, most of us are still waiting for our rebates.

Why are we doing this to ourselves when the world’s biggest carbon generators do nothing? The U.S. opted out. China, India and Russia have signed on, but only do cosmetic things while continuing to build coal fired electrical plants and suffocate thousands of their own people with air pollution.

We’re already behind the curve on trade competitiveness.

Lumbering ourselves with carbon taxes, and then trying to compete with countries without them, makes things even worse. It’s a simpleton’s ideology run amok.

Who pays the carbon taxes on the forest fires that ravaged B.C. and the western U.S. this summer? What about emissions from the volcanoes in Hawaii, Guatemala and Indonesia?

The Australians were smart; they dumped their carbon tax along with the politicians who foisted it on them.

All of this may please the UN climate club, but has little impact on the overall situation.

We should push the fact that our vast forests, fields, and lakes act like a huge carbon recycler which largely cancels out our carbon emissions. Being a passive carbon sink isn’t very glamorous though. Paris can be a magical place, but sometimes what you do there is best left behind.

Justin Trudeau says it’s important to put a price on carbon, but it looks more ornamental and self-serving than anything else. After all, no aspiring young globalist can appear on the world stage without a carbon tax, no matter how futile or damaging it is.

It’s all pretty tough to swallow coming from someone who’s spent 3 years burning a world record carbon footprint.

John Thompson

Kaleden