It’s rare in Canadian politics that parties on right, centre and left align uniformly on an issue: Carbon taxes are so out.
In one of his first acts as Prime Minster, Mark Carney eliminated the federal mandate for a carbon tax on consumer goods. It’s done the Liberals wonders in de-fanging their Conservative rivals in the federal election. And more than 17 years after B.C. became a leader in putting a price on pollution, NDP Premier David Eby announced this week that the province's carbon tax would be reduced to $0 for consumers.
We congratulate them all on arriving at this cynical and politically self-serving conclusion.
No tax is ever going to be popular. That goes doubly so in an era of runaway housing and grocery costs.
But the beauty of the carbon tax was that it was, to some degree, optional. Its entire point was to spur industry and consumers alike to make decisions that were better for the health of the planet – heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, EVs instead of V8s. As long as pollution is free, people will opt to do more of it.
And not one of our political leaders has offered up a clear alternative path to meet to our decarbonization commitments, which our children and grandchildren are depending on us to find.
Every dollar we save ourselves in Carbon Tax today, they will pay back tenfold. We save 17 cents per litre of gas and their climate becomes increasingly hostile to infrastructure, agriculture and biodiversity.
Future generations would be much better served if today’s leaders weren’t carbon copies of each other.
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