A friend and Yours Truly were discussing the carbon tax when he said he calculated how much carbon tax he paid after the federal rebate.
“I’d have to drive five times as much to use up all my rebate,” he said, wistfully, as he hates the carbon tax.
He drives about 50,000 kilometres a year.
The average Canadian consumes about 2,000 litres of gasoline a year and pays $340 carbon tax to drive while receiving $1,504 rebates in Saskatchewan this year.
Mind you, the rebate is intended to compensate for the carbon tax on everything else one consumes.
A farmer with a $60,000 diesel bill pays about $1,250 a year.
The Agricultural Producers Association estimates the carbon tax takes $7.24 an acre from a 62 bushel per acre wheat crop.
At current prices, that is 2.2 per cent of the value. Doesn't sound that onerous.
The carbon tax was once well regarded by Canadians.
In 2018 before the tax was legislated, 63 per cent of Canadians in an Angus Reid poll favoured it.
That has plunged to 17 per cent in recent polls.
So what happened to turn public opinion in six years?
The carbon tax applied to all residents is considered by economists as the least expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Communication and communication failures caused much of the opposition to a carbon tax.
The federal message that 80 per cent of residents receive more in the carbon tax rebate than they pay was lost in the ensuing partisan debate.
The federal opposition skewered the government by repeatedly claiming the carbon tax is killing jobs and increasing inflation.
Axe The Tax has become an everyday part of vocabulary.
The independent Bank of Canada says the carbon tax adds one-sixth of one per cent to inflation.
On the government side, massive communications failure has left many Canadians wondering about the rebate benefits.
A recent Angus Reid poll shows one-quarter don’t believe they get the carbon tax rebate and another 23 per cent are unsure.
The feds made a tremendous mistake by not mailing the rebate cheques. More than half of Canadians received the money by electronic transfer. Apparently, they never checked the source of the money.
The goal of carbon tax is to encourage an alternate source of energy such as electric vehicles. That alone raises hackles.
Most people do not like change, especially change disrupting longstanding practices.
Quebec and British Columbia do not have the federal carbon tax. B.C.’s tax has been accepted as the money collected becomes a credit to income tax.
Quebec has a cap-and-trade system allowing big polluters to continue polluting by paying penalties.
Residents of the other seven provinces, including Saskatchewan, pay carbon tax simply because their governments did not develop an emissions reduction plan that met federal standards.
That option still exists: come up with your own plan and the carbon tax is dead.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has taken up the challenge.
When the seven premiers got together in Ottawa on the tax, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was asked by reporters about his alternative to carbon tax.
He was quoted saying the alternatives “are too costly.’’
Guess who will pay for the costlier alternatives?
Ron Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
