I love the Carbon Tax so much, I want Trudeau to make it ten times higher!
If you go around polluting the Earth, you're gonna pay the price, bucko!
The Carbon Tax is in a wee bit of trouble. Currently, it subsists on a parasitic half-life, tied to the tenure of Justin Trudeau’s Premiership. But when his tenure ends, the Carbon Tax seems so politically anathemic that whether the next Prime Minister is a Liberal, a Conservative, or a Secret Third ThingTM, it appears destined for the policy graveyard.
How did things get this bad for the Liberal Carbon Tax? Just five years ago, Andrew Scheer’s anti-Carbon Tax Tories lost what should have been a winnable election; in their after-action reporting, the CBC boldly declared the Carbon Tax was the “big winner” of the election, with two-thirds of voters supporting pro-Carbon Tax parties.
Now, things are the opposite way around; Pierre Poilievre’s Tories are vociferously against limiting emissions, and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP have, in their cowardice, embraced free pollution, dirty air, and a dying planet.
Some day, I hope to have Jagmeet Singh’s courage and convictions. This is a man always at work, always asking himself the biggest, most important question: “How can I make the NDP even worse than we were under Mulcair?”
The political origins of carbon pricing, and cap-and-trade systems, are sufficiently far back that current political factions have shamelessly abandoned and demonized policies they once championed at the vanguard. Ultimately, unless you’re a historian, it’s not important for the current discussion.
It’s not important, because the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity. Existential threats, by their nature, require leadership to do everything within their power to stop them. During an existential threat, when you waste time debating whether action is necessary at all, you make it exponentially more difficult to defend what you’ve built against what is coming to tear it apart.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal carbon pricing backstop is perfectly constitutional. If this is the tool that is within Federal power, then the Federal government must use that tool, and any other tool they can obtain, in order to fight climate change. Any attempt to inject moral complexity into this is an illusion.
Usually, at this point, the Tories resort to one of two deflections, as it is no longer politically palatable to directly challenge the reality of climate change. Either they will sidetrack us by insisting we try failed alternatives, or they will stomp their feet and whine that it’s not fair that Canadian are expected to clean up our own messes.
On the first of these two deflections: There are no alternatives to directly reducing our carbon emissions. The current status of carbon capture technology is poor at best, and carbon offset programs have been routinely criticized for overstating how much carbon they actually offset! They are clear distractions from the one thing we already know is effective, direct reduction in carbon emissions.
That leads to the second prong of Tory attack, now aided by populist NDP provincial governments seeking short-term political gain. They will claim that Canada’s place in the world is small, and that Canada shouldn’t shoulder the burden. They will say that we shouldn’t be making Canadians pay anything, and that other countries should do all the hard work instead.
You may be asking yourself, as you read that: “But what if every other country says it’s not their problem too, and then nobody does anything?” And you would be right; as the Earth would boil away beneath our feet, humanity would do nothing but point our fingers at each other in mutual blame, and we would all die and be fossilized in our death re-enacting the Spider-Man meme. The logic is so fundamentally flawed it barely deserves the dignity of being called logic.
At last, this tediously bad-faith discussion ends with the final redoubt of Tory climate change denialism, the Cost Paradox. The Carbon Tax Cost Paradox, promulgated so extensively by Tories that it has now been internalized by centrist factions within both the Liberals and NDP, is a paradox because it posits that two exactly opposite things are both happening…at once.
Firstly, the Cost Paradox claims that the Carbon Tax is too low, and thus doesn’t convince anyone to reduce their emissions. Secondly, the Cost Paradox claims that the Carbon Tax is so high that it’s pushing Canadians into poverty and destitution.
Obviously, both of these cannot be true at the same time! The Carbon Tax cannot be so low that it doesn’t change consumer behaviour, and also so high that it’s changing consumer behaviour! How pathetic, that the Canadian political commentariat still engages with the Cost Paradox at face value when it’s so blatantly full of shit.
Let’s be clear with the purpose of a Carbon Tax: Making pollution more expensive is the entire point. I fundamentally believe in the philosophy that “if you break it, you buy it.” The environment is the public property of our entire civilization. If you break the environment with your actions, you damn well better pay for what you broke!
Prime Minister Trudeau recognized this, at least partially, with the initial rebate scheme. In theory, if your carbon emissions were lower than average, you would actually get money back; meanwhile, the financial burden would be carried mainly by Canadians who polluted more than the average person.
Unfortunately, this political framing didn’t take with the public, regardless of whether it actually did work as advertised. Arguably, it would have made more sense to spend all the Carbon Tax revenue directly on building high-speed rail and sponsoring provinces to expand nuclear power generation.
But the Prime Minister sabotaged himself irrevocably with the Atlantic heating oil exemption. The point of the Carbon Tax was to make pollution so expensive it changed consumer behaviour; heating oil, which is worse for carbon emissions than natural gas, should as a result be penalized more heavily by the Carbon Tax.
Instead, to satisfy caucus members in the Atlantic region, Trudeau made a carveout for heating oil, technically for the entire country, but targeted mainly at the Atlantic provinces where heating oil is more commonly used in comparison to the rest of the country. It made the rest of the country angry that they were being punished for polluting less, and it fed the narrative that the costs from the Carbon Tax are problematic.
Unfortunately for climate advocates, that was the death knell for the current version of the Carbon Tax. It was the loose thread that, once pulled, started to unravel the entire tapestry. The moment the Prime Minister retreated from making pollution more expensive, he legitimized the Cost Paradox, and gave fire to the Tories.
The Carbon Tax is politically unpopular for one simple reason: the Prime Minister lost confidence in himself and his own ideals. You cannot defend the Carbon Tax by playing into the narrative that it’s wrong to make pollution expensive, whether that pollution is done by a corporation or an individual.
And yet, there is a single pivot left, a final Hail Mary pass for Prime Minister Trudeau to throw towards the endzone. If he’s willing to shift strategy, and embrace what made him popular in the first place, he can salvage his signature program. He needs to make the Carbon Tax at least ten times higher than it is right now.
In 2024, Canada’s current minimum price for carbon is $80 CAD per tonne of CO2. By 2030, this minimum price will only hit $170 CAD per tonne of CO2 emissions. Quite simply, this annual schedule is a flawed approach. Anyone promising net-zero with a Carbon Tax this low is lying to you; fossil fuels price spikes have much more to do with transient supply shocks, rather than the comparitively miniscule Carbon Tax.
As long as Canada’s emissions continue to climb rather than drop, it is a sign that the price per tonne is simply not high enough. The Liberal Government needs to raise the Carbon Tax, and then raise it again, and then keep raising it. Until the carbon starts to go down, the Carbon Tax needs to go up. Like Bob Homme said on The Friendly Giant for decades: “Look up…waaaaaaay up!”
Canadians who poison the water we drink and the air we breathe will pay the price for their wanton destruction. Pollution must become so expensive that even the wealthiest among us should fear the Carbon Tax. Those foolish enough to pollute will pay copious amounts of cash, and those funds will be used to accelerate Canada’s green transition, and make net-zero something tangible.
Prime Minister Trudeau has been on defence for too long, and it’s time to shift the tempo. Every single time Pierre Poilievre stands in the House of Commons, and utters the words “Carbon Tax Election”, the Prime Minister needs to respond that the Carbon Tax will now be $20 per tonne higher. The Prime Minister needs to be aggressive with Pierre Poilievre, and take control of the entire discussion.
Quite literally, the Prime Minister needs to smile through one of Poilievre’s Question Period rants, leave, and then immediately raise the Carbon Tax by $500 per tonne. An example must be made, that those who complain about doing the right thing will make it even harder for the rest of us. With this, the Prime Minister can swiftly and harshly end any debate, and force the Tories to move on with their lives.
I don’t care if you’ve built your life in a way that you feel your pollution is justified. I don’t care what excuse any person has for why they personally shouldn’t have to pay more for polluting more. They’re all equally worthless and what little sympathy I have drains away with each passing day.
I don’t care about the F-150 you got five years ago and have never used to haul or tow in your life. I don’t care about the gas stove you should have replaced with an electric one back on the other side of the millennium. I don’t care about your short-hop flight from Toronto to Ottawa that you booked because you don’t like VIA Rail.
These are all choices that people make, and those choices have consequences for the world we live in. And it is constantly infurating, to watch as those of us willing to do the right thing are sabotaged by selfish, entitled assholes. Something about the Carbon Tax speaks to my innate sense of justice, that we could live in a version of Canada where people have to take personal responsibility for the harm they do to others. I wish that kind of justice existed in more places in our lives.
I love the Carbon Tax, because it’s our most effective tool at fighting climate change. I am angry that a wave of populist fervour is about to rip that tool away from us. I’m infuriated that so-called progressives are helping aid and abet that populism. I’m fearful for the consequences of a world where doing the right thing has become unpopular.
It’s time for the Prime Minister to defend his own accomplishments, because if he won’t, nobody else will. It’s time for him to step out on the front foot, and start throwing some punches back at his political opponents.
It’s time for Canada’s Carbon Tax to be raised into the stratosphere, raised so high that it becomes the most expensive carbon pricing regime on the face of the Earth. And after the Prime Minister does it, he should go out to the Parliamentary Press Gallery, and he should publicly thank Pierre Poilievre for giving him such a wonderful idea.