Trudeau and the premiers robbing us blind
The more Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada’s premiers talk about climate change — as they did Monday in Ottawa — the further away they drift from reality.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, for example, describes the $3 billion-a-year carbon tax she just announced for her province, which she says will cost the average Alberta family about $500 a year, as “revenue neutral.”
Either she doesn’t understand what revenue neutral means, or she’s just making it up as she goes along.
Revenue neutral means when a government introduces a new tax, it lowers other taxes so that the net effect on government revenues stays the same.
Notley says revenue neutral means the carbon tax money won’t go into the province’s general revenue fund, but will be allocated to programs such as subsidizing low-income earners facing the added costs of carbon pricing and building public transit.
What Notley is really doing is taking $3 billion a year more out of the pockets of Albertans in a province whose economy is already under water because of collapsing oil prices.
Not to be outdone, Ontario Climate Change Minister Glen Murray spend an entire column in the Toronto Star Monday not explaining how Premier Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan, which will take up to $2 billion annually out of the pockets of Ontarians, will actually work.
They plan to give free carbon credits — literally, free money — to Ontario’s big industrial polluters for at least four years for all their emissions, while these businesses raise the prices of their goods and services as if they had paid for them.
The government will make money from the increased taxes it will receive on higher-priced goods and services, and by auctioning off carbon credits, initially to non-exempt industries and eventually by reducing the number of free credits.
This is exactly what destroyed the credibility of Europe’s decade-old cap-and-trade market, the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Obviously, if you give industry free carbon credits you aren’t putting a price on their carbon dioxide emissions — you’re just jacking up the cost-of-living to the public, with little environmental benefit.
Ontario’s scheme also won’t be revenue neutral, and thus, like Notley’s, is really just a cash grab.
By contrast, B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s $1.2 billion-a-year carbon tax is revenue neutral, because, while not everyone benefits equally, it does return the money raised in tax cuts to the public.
The bad news is B.C.’s tax will only reduce its emissions by three megatonnes annually by 2020 — which China spews out every 2.5 hours.
Finally, Trudeau, after spending years hammering former prime minister Stephen Harper for setting unambitious climate change targets, has now adopted them.
But he’ll never be able to implement them because he would have to shut down the equivalent of 58% of Canada’s oil and gas sector by 2020, 100% by 2030.
But why let the facts get in the way of a cash grab?
source: Trudeau and the premiers robbing us blind | GOLDSTEIN | Canada | News | Toronto
The more Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada’s premiers talk about climate change — as they did Monday in Ottawa — the further away they drift from reality.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, for example, describes the $3 billion-a-year carbon tax she just announced for her province, which she says will cost the average Alberta family about $500 a year, as “revenue neutral.”
Either she doesn’t understand what revenue neutral means, or she’s just making it up as she goes along.
Revenue neutral means when a government introduces a new tax, it lowers other taxes so that the net effect on government revenues stays the same.
Notley says revenue neutral means the carbon tax money won’t go into the province’s general revenue fund, but will be allocated to programs such as subsidizing low-income earners facing the added costs of carbon pricing and building public transit.
What Notley is really doing is taking $3 billion a year more out of the pockets of Albertans in a province whose economy is already under water because of collapsing oil prices.
Not to be outdone, Ontario Climate Change Minister Glen Murray spend an entire column in the Toronto Star Monday not explaining how Premier Kathleen Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan, which will take up to $2 billion annually out of the pockets of Ontarians, will actually work.
They plan to give free carbon credits — literally, free money — to Ontario’s big industrial polluters for at least four years for all their emissions, while these businesses raise the prices of their goods and services as if they had paid for them.
The government will make money from the increased taxes it will receive on higher-priced goods and services, and by auctioning off carbon credits, initially to non-exempt industries and eventually by reducing the number of free credits.
This is exactly what destroyed the credibility of Europe’s decade-old cap-and-trade market, the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Obviously, if you give industry free carbon credits you aren’t putting a price on their carbon dioxide emissions — you’re just jacking up the cost-of-living to the public, with little environmental benefit.
Ontario’s scheme also won’t be revenue neutral, and thus, like Notley’s, is really just a cash grab.
By contrast, B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s $1.2 billion-a-year carbon tax is revenue neutral, because, while not everyone benefits equally, it does return the money raised in tax cuts to the public.
The bad news is B.C.’s tax will only reduce its emissions by three megatonnes annually by 2020 — which China spews out every 2.5 hours.
Finally, Trudeau, after spending years hammering former prime minister Stephen Harper for setting unambitious climate change targets, has now adopted them.
But he’ll never be able to implement them because he would have to shut down the equivalent of 58% of Canada’s oil and gas sector by 2020, 100% by 2030.
But why let the facts get in the way of a cash grab?
source: Trudeau and the premiers robbing us blind | GOLDSTEIN | Canada | News | Toronto
