A 3.5 per cent increase in costs due to carbon tax

I rarely respond to readers of my opinion pieces because it is great when people have different opinions and express them. But when someone writes (Terry Snead of Musgravetown, "LETTER: Looking at the carbon tax facts" in the April 13 Telegram) and makes statements such as “I assume he meant,” I have to respond.

I meant what I wrote and I did not write nor mean that gas increased by 3.5 cents due to carbon tax. What I meant and wrote was that the carbon tax increased the cost to trucking companies by 3.5 per cent. I refer him to Stats Canada. I made no reference whatsoever to the “cost per tonne.”

Following that analysis, I concluded that this increase in cost was passed on to consumers resulting in a 3.5 per cent increase in cost of things such as groceries.

Year over year since the carbon tax was introduced, consumption of fuel by litres, not cost, has increased on an average of five per cent annually, so the carbon tax is doing nothing to reduce consumption and hence emissions.

I don’t need to be told we need to reduce consumption. We do! But the carbon tax does not work. Smokers don‘t quit because of cost, people don’t stop drinking soda because of a sugar tax, beer drinkers don’t stop drinking because of increased prices.

Investments in clean technology, affordable electric vehicles, hydrogen investment, and investments in businesses to reduce their carbon footprints, do. In my business, for example, a charity, we burn 17,000 litres of heating fuel annually and there are no programs to help us reduce. That’s 52 tonnes of CO2 or the equivalent of the emissions of 12 vehicles.

So, Mr. Snead, that is what I meant to write and what I wrote. And by collecting a tax and then giving it back to consumers, many who don’t own vehicles, don’t heat their homes with oil, don’t purchase any kind of fossil fuel, is absolutely silly. Residents of long-term care homes and even those incarcerated get the carbon tax. A person with an electric vehicle, heating their home with a heat pump, gets the same rebate amount as I do. Offer me a defense for that! Ask a mortgage holder if a tripling of their mortgage rate reduced inflation.

We have a government in Ottawa of cowards whose policies punish us not reward us and since being elected have increased our national debt by $900 billion.

And this is not political bashing because I have traditionally voted Liberal.

But not this time. They will not buy my vote with a portion of my own money.

And that is what I meant to say! Tom Badcock St. John's