Ontario’s new PC government has scrapped the cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax by another name. The move will save Ontario taxpayers $3 billion over four years or, as the NDP and most of the media put it, lost revenue for the government.
Let them lose it, I’d rather keep it.
Trudeau though isn’t happy with the idea of ordinary people keeping their own money and has promised a carbon tax on any province that doesn’t have their own by Jan. 1, 2019.
Now, how much will it cost you?
That depends on where you live, how you heat your home and how much you drive, but the report out this week says $648 for the “typical” Ontario household.
That figure isn’t far off the projections of University of Calgary professor Jennifer Winter who calculated Trudeau’s tax would cost Ontario homes $707 per year compared to $1,111 in Alberta and $683 in Manitoba.
The highest cost in her report is for Nova Scotia, which faces $1,120 in extra taxes per household under Trudeau’s plan.
In the FAO report, the typical household isn’t determined by household size but energy usage. They calculate 2,000 litres of gasoline, electricity consumption of 9 MWh, natural gas consumption of 2,200 cubic metres.
That means an increase of 11.1 cents per litre in the price of gas and 9.8 cents per cubic metre on natural gas.
That’s if Trudeau stops at just $50 a ton in 2022.
Chances are that after the next election he will be upping the carbon tax dramatically. Well, if the Liberals win power again.
They are already praising high carbon taxes.
This past week the Liberals were praising a United Nations report that called for a much larger, and global, carbon tax.
“The UN report was clear that we are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change, and we are the last generation to be able to act,” Catherine McKenna, Trudeau’s environment minister, told the House of Commons.
This report called for a carbon tax as high as $5,500 per ton by 2030.
That would mean adding about $17 a litre in new taxes for gasoline. That’s before you pay for the gas or account for the current taxes.
Can you imagine paying $18.50 a litre by 2030?
If you believe the UN report, and Trudeau’s Liberals say they do, then we have to assume they will want to raise the tax.
If we don’t raise such taxes the UN report says we will kill the planet and therefore ourselves.
So a higher carbon tax must be in Trudeau’s plans.
We are one year away from an election, an election that will be fought over the carbon tax.
