Trudeau's Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change

"Today Justin Trudeau unveiled his election gimmick to try to trick Canadians into paying higher taxes on basic necessities."
"Canadians have known all along that Justin Trudeau's carbon tax was just a tax plan dressed up as an emissions plan. Now we know it's really also just an election gimmick."
Conservative opposition leader Andrew Scheer

"Never believe a politician who tells you he will save you money by hiking your taxes."
"The people of Canada are too smart to believe that Trudeau's phony rebates are anything more than a temporary vote-buying scheme that will be discarded once the election is over. In contrast, the carbon tax rip-off is forever."
Ontario Premier Doug Ford

"We see it as a cynical vote-buying scheme using your money to buy your vote."
"This is Saskatchewan. Most of us have to drive a lot. We drive to work, we drive for our kids' recreation and their school, and we have to heat our homes on some very cold days in this province."
"This is all going to cost a whole lot more now."
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe

As initiatives go, in Canada setting out to do its part in the international scheme to alleviate the belief in man-made assaults on nature leading to climate change, the latest scheme blueprinted by the Liberal government is as inept and irrational as someone's hideous nightmare in which there is no escape from an oncoming juggernaut meant to crush social and economic dissent from a Canada mostly slack-jawed with amazement that credibility of government decision-making cannot possibly descend any lower. Fighting greenhouse gases? Taking positive steps to reduce carbon emissions?

Since we can't stop breathing and producing carbon dioxide, and the world's vegetation will continue to absorb C02 and convert sunlight to oxygen to produce the cleansed air we breathe, we'll just have to make do with paying more taxes under guise of combating global warming and wait for those government cheques that will refund to us ostensibly more per household than we've expended in fighting the good fight, allowing the Liberal government to claim it has lived up to its Paris climate obligations by playing Trudeau's shell game.



Trudeau's 'Pan-Canadian' initiative looks pretty flaccid, particularly to those provinces that have stated unequivocally that they have opted out of a joint plan that is supposed to include the federal government, the provinces and the territories in an agreed-upon blueprint for reducing carbon emissions; which is to say the 1.6 percent Canada is responsible for on a worldwide scale. Only it appears that half of Canada's provinces want nothing to do with this particular plan and more are on the cusp of joining them.

Latterly the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changed made it official; for a carbon tax to be useful to save us from no-turning-back global warming it would require said tax to begin at $135 a tonne and rise to $5,500 a tonne by 2030; in other words, it would beggar the global economy and send it into a backward spin. Since the tax the Liberals are levying begins at $20, to rise to $50 it is clearly inadequate in the global scale of saving the Earth from humankind's depredations. Despite which, the Liberal government is confident it is achieving its Paris promise.

Oh, the pain of it ... yet another tax imposed by a government incapable of restraining itself from spending whatever it acquires through taxation, and more, as the deficit looms and the nation's debt blooms grotesquely obese. Still, the Prime Minister vowed "every nickel" brought in as part of the federal carbon tax is to be re-circulated back to each province to be doled out to residents of those provinces, ten percent reserved to go to schools, universities and small businesses. All is not lost. Actually, nothing is lost; we get taxed, we get refunded. In the process, what is gained?

Carbon dioxide, so necessary to life, is "pollution" and it must be fought tooth and nail and taxes are the way to go, only they're not taxes, they're commitment to an existential cause, so who in their right mind would balk at that? The regulatory inefficiency of a complex scheme that will have the effect of restraining growth in the economy and making life just a little more difficult for small business and their customers is the price to pay for prolonging environmental balance in a threatened world. Sounds reasonable.

As it stands now, the tax won't be equitable, but on the other hand, neither will the refunds be; a little like universality, it is meant to be an issue of simple accountability, so simple that it takes no account of those living in areas of the country where more fuel is required to drive to destinations, to heat winter homes, and nor are those in comfortable median income brackets to receive less of a 'rebate' than people living on inadequate incomes just getting by. Not by calculating how much people emit, but simplifying things to a one-size-fits-all formula.

Ottawa is prepared to subsidize export-oriented emitters clearly incapable of competing on the world stage should they pass increased carbon costs to their buyers in world markets, but domestic marketers who sell their products internally can anticipate no such relief, they will absorb the increased carbon tax and of course it will be the consumer who will pay the additional cost through the nose. Imports are advantaged but internal business costs will escalate.

Canada's new Liberal-imposed carbon tax will do nothing to make an impact on emissions, but it most certainly will go a long way, along with previous legislated heightened taxes for business to discourage investment and persuade international business interests to relocate elsewhere in more tax-enlightened jurisdictions abroad; back to the United States most likely as Canada's economy becomes more straitened reflecting the success of the Liberal carbon tax legislation.