You Don’t Want to Read It. I Don’t Want to Write It. Why Are We Talking About the Carbon Tax Again?

When national climate policy is reduced to three-syllable rhymes, you know it won’t end well.

Mar 31, 2024

I can’t believe it’s taking up all the oxygen in the room. Again.

What is there to say about the federal carbon tax that hasn’t already been said? Over. And over. And over again?

And yet, here we are. Provincial premiers of a certain political persuasion have spent the last decade making federal carbon pricing an excuse and a scapegoat for their own failure to address a cascading cost of living crisis, or tackle a climate emergency that is multiplying those front-line losses with epic wildfires, crippling drought, and more frequent, severe storms. Their latest federal champion, a lifelong political hack who’s never had any real job experience, reduces the complexities of federal-provincial relations and a global climate emergency to cute slogans like “Axe the Tax” and “Spike the Hike”. It’s a strategy whose effective messaging is matched only by its substantive and moral bankruptcy.

The net result? A quick Google search shows some of the early, earnest economic analysis of the “distributional effects of a Canadian carbon tax” going back to December, 1994—so if you were born around the time that journal article was in production, you’ve just turned 30. (The math is easy here because we celebrated that birthday last week, and how can I not sneak an oblique reference to my daughter into The Weekender?)

So we’ve lost three decades we couldn’t afford in the fight against climate change, arguing over a consumer carbon pricing system that economists swore would work perfectly well in theory, even if it had little or no impact in practice. Now we’re on track to waste another three or four years if the federal Conservatives ride the carbon tax to victory in next year’s federal election, then spend their first couple of years in office loudly unravelling it.

Not a Programming Note: We sometimes interrupt The Weekender with programming notes. This is so much more important.
I can’t write this week’s edition without a remembrance for Matthew Chapman, the friend, climate colleague, and bright, shining inspiration who died earlier this month at age 40. Matt’s smile was as wide as the sky, his heart was as big as the universe, and he had a way of making everyone feel they had a place in this fight, in this community—not by declaring it, but by showing it. I don’t think I’ll ever really accept that we have to start writing about Matt in the past tense.
If you knew Matt, or even if you didn’t, please consider clicking through to the GoFundMe page for his young family. Climate Reality Project Canada is also calling for donations to the Montreal Climate Coalition, an organization that “held a special place” in that big, big heart of his.

Reality Pushes Back

It's been a relief over the last few weeks to see the counterpunch finally taking shape, after years of mostly unanswered attacks on the federal carbon price. After inexplicably failing to take coherent credit for a policy that puts money back in Canadians’ pockets, Ottawa is finally, belatedly making the case that the large majority of us get more money back from the carbon tax than it costs us. Their in-house communications wizards even seem to have figured out how to give the rebate an obvious enough name that we know what we’re looking at when we see it on our credit union or bank statements.

Carbon tax defenders have begun cranking out news and opinion columns to make the case that the industrial carbon price actually works pretty well, even if it’s riddled with loopholes. That pausing the carbon tax won’t pause climate change or address a cost of living crisis that was not caused by carbon pricing, and that for all the storm and fury they’ve worked so hard to mobilize, provincial premiers haven’t come up with a better way to tackle the climate emergency. More than 250 economists have weighed in with an open letter asserting that a carbon tax is still the best climate response their profession can come up with.

And last week, courageously, tenacious climate campaigner and carbon pricing advocate Cathy Orlando stood outside a Spike the Hike rally in Sudbury—not to defend the carbon tax, she told colleagues, but to try to elevate democratic discourse. “Carbon pricing makes my life more affordable,” her hand-drawn sign read.

"If you're against carbon pricing, can you please show us your plan?” she asked participants at a small rally hosted by Conservative MP Scott Aitchison. “Because the climate crisis is costing us a lot more money and will continue to do so even more."

The community-side pushback is welcome, even if it’s years overdue. But it still leaves two questions unanswered:

• How did we end up fighting our generation’s biggest existential threat by trying to persuade Canadians to love a new tax?

• How could we have made better use of those years and decades, by aligning climate action and emissions reductions with the things people already know they need and want to make life better?

So What Do We Talk About?

So if the manufactured controversy over carbon pricing evaporated overnight, what could we possibly have left to talk about?

If only we could come up with some stories that actually mattered in real life, and directly supported the push to get climate change under control.

Oh, wait. Here are a few examples:

• Canadians can expect to see $25 billion in annual losses from climate damage as early as next year, with individual households bearing the biggest brunt, the Canadian Climate Institute projected in 2022. Investing in local resilience would save $13 to $15 for every dollar spent, but it’s hard to have a serious conversation about practical solutions when political theatrics are taking up all the air time.

• Energy efficiency advisors are fighting for their jobs after the federal government cut a Greener Home Grants program that was too successful to continue. Energy efficiency and heat pump conversion grants turned out to be so much more popular than Ottawa policy-makers imagined that a seven-year plan burned through its budget in about 2½. So why build on that success when you can save a few bucks and throw a nascent energy efficiency industry into chaos?

• The restrictions on new projects that followed Alberta’s needless, seven-month moratorium on renewable energy development will cost the province 57 projects worth $14 billion, the Pembina Institute’s Jason Wang estimates. Previously, analysis by the Business Renewables Centre-Canada showed 33 rural municipalities in Alberta losing $277 million in local tax revenues if projects were delayed or cancelled.

• Canada’s fossil fuel subsidies over the last four years would have been enough to pay for all the country’s solar and wind energy projects between 2019 and 2021 12 times over, according to analysis by Environmental Defence Canada. The time spans in the comparison look slightly contrived, but the message is still clear—despite laudable, world-leading federal efforts to quell fossil subsidies, the funding is still far out of step with where taxpayers’ dollars should be spent to address the combined climate emergency and cost of living crisis.

• The federal Clean Electricity Regulations are under relentless attack by the same provincial governments that brought us the trumped-up (these days, I use that adjective advisedly) controversy around carbon pricing. Ottawa has already watered down the regulations, even though The Atmospheric Fund says cities desperately need a robust set of utility decarbonization rules to hold onto their own “clean grid advantage”.

• In British Columbia, the Stand Environmental Society and two local residents are taking FortisBC to court, accusing the provincial utility of greenwashing its gas supplies and misleading consumers about its climate impacts, as well as the cost of gas heat compared to electric heat pumps. “We don’t want any financial gain from this case,” Stand Senior Campaigns Director Liz McDowell told media. “We just want FortisBC to be forced to stop spreading this misinformation and start telling the truth.”

All of these stories—and so many dozens of others—have more impact on Canadians’ everyday lives than the latest back-and-forth over carbon taxes. They all point to bigger opportunities to get at the impacts of climate change or, better still, get climate pollution under control.

But with only limited air time and political capital available, there’s a very good chance that they’ll all be submerged by Pierre Poilievre’s latest three-syllable rhyme. Which means the solid climate momentum Canada has built up over the last decade (still not sufficient, but inarguably solid) could all be burned to the ground by the political response to a pricing policy that should only ever have been a side show, not a centrepiece, in building a national climate plan that every Canadian could get behind.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.