Solsticewitch13's BOS: The Trudeau Liberals Just Admitted The Carbon Tax Will Hurt Canada’s Economy

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Can they get any more incompetent?

Ever since the Trudeau Liberals introduced the idea of the carbon tax, people have been raising concerns about how it will damage Canada’s economy.

It hurts Canadian businesses by increasing their costs, and hurts Canadian consumers by raising the price of everything as it filters out through the economy.

It also makes Canadian businesses far less competitive when compared to businesses in the US who don’t have a carbon tax, and have lower overall business taxes as well.

For years, the Trudeau Liberals ignored those concerns, saying the carbon tax was necessary to deal with ‘global emissions,’ (total BS), and that it wouldn’t hurt the economy at all. In fact, Catherine McKenna has repeatedly said the carbon tax and the Liberals ‘environmental’ policies would help the economy and boost growth.

But now, the Trudeau Liberals have admitted that the carbon tax will hurt Canada’s economy.

They didn’t say that of course, but the recent announcement that they’re setting a lower carbon tax price is a clear admission of how damaging the tax is.

As noted in a recent report, “The Liberal government is curtailing its plan to price carbon pollution after hearing concerns from Canadian industry officials about how the tax would impact competitiveness. As the Globe and Mail first reported Wednesday morning, Environment and Climate Change Canada plans to release new guidelines that lower the percentage of emissions some polluters will have to pay the carbon tax on. Back in January, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna set the benchmark at 70 per cent of an industry’s average emissions performance, meaning companies would have to pay a tax on 30 per cent of their emissions.”

Now, the tax will apply to between 10% and 20% of emissions.

Notably however, the per-tonne cost remains the same.

The move comes as Canadians turn against the carbon tax, with Ontario and Saskatchewan fighting it in court, Manitoba introducing a carbon tax that the government rejects as too weak, PEI fighting against it, New Brunswick introducing a plan McKenna opposed, and Alberta likely to elect a Conservative government in 2019 that will scrap the provincial carbon tax.

Scrap the tax entirely

This move by the Trudeau government is an obvious admission that the tax hurts the economy. After all, if it didn’t hurt the economy, why would reducing it help competitiveness?

It also exposes the dishonesty of the government. If the tax was really about helping the environment, then wouldn’t lowering it be a total disaster?

By lowering it, the government has admitted that it’s not about the environment at all, and that it is bad for the economy.

So that raises the obvious question: Why not scrap it entirely?

A lower carbon tax is technically better than a higher carbon tax, but it’s still far worse than no carbon tax. As long as the carbon tax exists, Canada’s businesses are less competitive, and Canadian consumers are getting screwed over. If the Liberals actually wanted to fix that problem, they would get rid of it fully.

The Trudeau government continues to fall further and further into the depths of incompetence and dishonesty.