The lies won. And goodbye carbon rebates.
We should all be embarrassed that we've let shameless politics kill a system that cost-effectively reduces pollution and ensures the poorest are overwhelmingly made better off.
Policies need popular support to be sustained. I get that. And the carbon pricing + rebate system is now dead, killed by Conservatives in a dedicated campaign of lies.
We failed to defend it successfully.
Singh already walked away from consumer carbon pricing months ago. And now all LPC leadership candidates are ready to do the same.
We should all be embarrassed that we've let shameless politics kill a system that cost-effectively reduces pollution and ensures the poorest are overwhelmingly made better off.
We forget too easily that Harper, Poilievre, Manning and politicians who otherwise express unending devotion to free markets all previously supported carbon pricing.
Why? Because it's a market-based mechanism for reducing pollution, by internalizing a negative externality and driving innovation.
Too many too easily accept the lie that carbon pricing makes Canadians poorer.
Yes, it could have been better designed to recycle revenues in a more targeted way to working class families rather than universal payments. But the rebate system clearly made the poorest in our society better off.
So what happens now?
1) Fighting climate change gets more expensive for the taxpayer. Consumer carbon pricing only represented around 10% of emission reductions in the overall plan, so it's thankfully not fatal. But alternative subsidy approaches to reach the same cuts to pollution will cost us more.
2) The poorest will now be worse off. The rebate made most families whole on a fiscal basis, but the poorest in our society were much better off. Without the price on pollution, there's no revenue for the rebates.
I'm not new to politics. I understand the need to win to implement good ideas. But it's shameful that we've gotten to this place, where good ideas must be sacrificed to sustained lies.
LPC leadership contestants need to step up with better ideas now: on affordability, productivity, inequality, democratic reform, and climate action.
See also:
The messaging was never good on this program and therefore got defined for you by the opposition. It may have been a better angle to make it a fund for paying for the actual cost of climate related events, forest fires, floods, etc. Most people couldn’t see the point it.
Thanks for your post Nathan. Accurate and appreciate your willingness to call out the hypocrisy of the Conservatives and your Liberal colleagues who now have abandoned the CT.
The Federal CT/Rebate scheme was too slick by half - as Canadians were too stupid to know where that deposit to their back account came from and even if they did, or once they found out, could not recognize that something like 70% would have received more in the rebate than they paid in the tax - which Trudeau et Co were afraid to call it a CT and came up with some artificial name that everyone forgot - including me and could not relate it to the CT. Sometime what communication spin doctors strategy comes back to bite you on the ass.
Had they levied the tax clearly, and indicated that the revenues would be offset by various subsidies and initiatives for people to buy EV's and Hybrids and insulate their homes better and install heat pumps and expand and improve public transit - things that people could see and feel, it would have been far more effective.
The government's failure to eliminate the regulatory subsidies to SUV and light trucks (lower safety standards and fuel efficiency standards less stringent than for passenger cars) and failure to tax these gas guzzlers and public safety hazards on the road (SUV's and half-tons that are higher and heavier than sedans cause more deadly and costly accidents), has meant that Half-tons and SUV sales now dominate the new vehicle sales stats and have for about a dozen years if not longer.
Here in BC, the NDP had the good sense to eliminate the "revenue neutral" aspect of our CT and have put the money into subsidies for Heat Pumps, solar panels, public transit, home efficiency upgrades, EV;s and Hybrids, etc. It has always had public support - although that is sliding because of constant attacks against the CT by Poilievre and Conservatives nationally and in BC and now federal LIberal candidates abandoning it.
What's this say about Canadians? And our efforts and responsibility to reduce emissions? Are we as stupid as Americans??
Thanks for having the courage to expose this lack of political courage.