In praise of a Carbon Tax

A Carbon Tax is straightforward common sense, good heavens, even Suncor gets it. Why is it still beyond our fossilized provincial government? Can’t these dinosaurs recognize inevitability when it smacks them in the face? Environmental taxes are coming sooner or later Mr. Stelmach, get used to it. I guess that like the dinosaurs of way back, they will eventually be annihilated by forces beyond their  comprehension.

Given that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, isn’t it common sense to tax what you don’t want and use the revenue to remove taxes from what you do want? The Green Party has had a Tax Shift policy in place forever, promoted as, “Tax the Bads, Not the Goods”.

Stefan Dion made tax shifting his major policy during the last election. Was he prescient or just hanging out with highly informed people? Sure, it was bad politics at the time, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong policy, simply unpopular, poorly delivered and viciously attacked by other parties. After all we tax alcohol, cigarettes and gambling heavily, why not apply the same thinking to climate changing, smog generating, duck killing petroleum products?

Both the Green Tax Shift and the Liberal one were clearly sold as “revenue neutral” – in layman’s words, NOT A TAX GRAB. All revenues created would be used to reduce other taxes, most notably income taxes. However, the conservatives (predictably) chose to ignore that, but the NDP (shamefully) used it as a political weapon assuming (wrongly) that disenchanted Grit votes would go to them. How misguided they were then with jack Layton portraying himself as the PM in waiting.

Deputy Premier, Doug Horner, said “We’re not in favour of a carbon tax because we don’t believe it’s going to accomplish what we want to get to” and then went on to spout how we are a province that ”… prides itself on having the lowest tax regime….”etc. etc. The first statement is disingenuous in the extreme since anyone who spends money knows that the first criteria when making a purchase, is cost. The more an item costs, the less likely we are to buy it and the more likely we are to find an alternative (i.e. LRT, bus, bike, walk) and now that we are all greening our lives, that’s good. The second statement was fine while we were in a boom economy, but we aren’t any longer. Alberta is now running a large deficit and needs revenue to maintain standards in environment, health and education. Where are you going to get it from Mr. Horner, the cupboard is bare?

Of course the easiest solution of all is to remove subsidies to the oil industry, a suggestion given to Mr. Harper for the upcoming G8/G20 summit. But that would probably not go down well with the recently carbon tax enlightened CEO of Suncor.

So, we continue with business as usual as the situation gets ever worse, the costs ever higher and the solutions ever more difficult to implement. When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

If we are to get through the current ecological and economic crises with our standard of living remaining anything like it is now some very difficult decisions will have to me made. The current crop of Canadian political leaders does not have the right stuff for this task.

Sincerely, David J. Parker   PEng