Recent rallies across Alberta protesting Alberta’s Carbon Tax – scheduled to come into effect in January – drew hundreds of protestors and thousands of signatures for a petition asking the tax be scrapped.
While the rallies send a strong message to government about the lack of support for what many call the tax on everything, the federal government has tied the province’s hands.
Jurisdictions can either implement their own tax or be subjected to the federal rules. For that reason protests can’t simply be directed at one level of government if they are going to be effective.
The Carbon Tax, like anything associated with climate change, is so politically charged that rational conversations have become nearly impossible. Factor in the fact that Canada’s carbon emissions relative to the rest of the world are pretty insignificant, and convincing detractors of the need for a carbon tax is unlikely.
The problem with the federal and provincial carbon tax proposals is they are irrationally based on blind political ideology, which undermines the merit they have in certain respects.
As a carbon-cutting, climate-fixing measure, the tax will essentially be useless. Canada does not contribute enough to either of those problems – assuming you believe those are problems – to have much an effect.
As a means to invest in alternative energy and prepare for the eventual transition from non-renewable to renewable energy the tax does make some sense, but that transition can’t be based on simple ideology either.
Resources like coal and oil are by their nature finite. As populations increase so will demand, meaning the supplies of both those resources will dwindle at a faster rate. That being said estimates of remaining reserves of both coal and oil place their life expectancy at well beyond that of our newest generation of citizens.
The question is how much of those reserves can be mined or drilled safely and affordably. Eventually, as the cheap and easy deposits run out, access and cost will become concerns.
At that point, without alternatives, our population could find itself in an energy crisis or paying highly-inflated prices as the cost of extraction balloons.
Using the carbon tax to prepare for that eventuality makes sense, but not at a cost that will hurt the average citizen.
The transition away from conventional energy should also be market driven and not government driven. The consumer has much more power over those types of changes than politicians or bureaucrats. Government incentives for research and development of renewable energy to prepare for consumer readiness should be the extent of the carbon tax’s goals.
The tax should also be limited to have minor effects on the general population. Taxing the producer right down to the distributor is unbearably accumulative.
Instead of questionably-effective tax credits, the government should consider exemptions. Those exemptions, for example, should be on producers, shippers and distributors of food and other necessities.
Why should average Canadians have to pay this tax on their food, their gas, their heat and basically every purchase they make?
