Andrew Coyne: A carbon tax is coming, no matter what Ontario PC candidates say
All of the major candidates in the leadership race having pledged to have nothing to do with the carbon tax — Doug Ford immediately and enthusiastically, Caroline Mulroney and Christine Elliott belatedly, after seeing how Ford’s position was playing with the membership — the party would seem to have renounced its platform, blown a hole in its budget and, er, become stupid.
Except … that’s not what’s actually happening. The candidates can’t promise to scrap the carbon tax, because the platform didn’t promise to implement one. What it promised was to acquiesce in a federal carbon tax. A PC government would “opt in to the federal carbon price backstop,” as the document put it, “rather than directly impose one of its own.”
Of course, “acquiesce” suggests the party has some choice in the matter. But in fact it has none. It might have chosen to implement its own carbon tax, in which case the federal government would have deferred in its favour. But in the absence of a provincial tax, the feds have served notice they would impose their own. Whether the province agrees to it is irrelevant. The feds have the power to act unilaterally.
The candidates’ declaration of opposition to a carbon tax is therefore as meaningless as the platform’s readiness to “opt in” to it.
Either way, the tax will be collected. And either way, the province will most likely receive the same amount in revenues. The federal government has pledged, as a technical paper explained last year, to “return direct revenues from the carbon price to the jurisdiction of origin,” meaning, as the platform put it, “the province will receive a transfer worth the equivalent of all carbon pricing paid for by Ontario citizens.”
Andrew Coyne: A carbon tax is coming, no matter what Ontario PC candidates say | National Post
