As drivers rush to the pumps to try to get ahead of Saturday’s gas price hike, Ottawa and Atlantic Canadian premiers are at odds over whether the carbon tax should be brought in now.
Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, says carbon pricing is one of the most widely used and effective ways to fight climate change and notes it will make fossil fuels more expensive and make alternatives less expensive.
He added provinces had a lot of time to prepare for this.
“We’ve been working on this since 2019. So it’s not like this is coming out of the blue,” said Guilbeault. “And unfortunately many of them waited at the very last minute to implement measures.”
Meanwhile the Atlantic Premiers are urging Ottawa to rethink its clean fuel regulations and for people to write their Members of Parliament.
In addition to a 14 cent a litre price jump in gas prices in Nova Scotia Saturday due to the carbon tax, gas prices will increase nearly 4 cents on July 7 because of new clean fuel regulations.
The Council of Atlantic Premiers argue it will disproportionally increase costs for Atlantic Canadians.
The premiers have also been fighting against the carbon tax, arguing its implementation should be delayed because of inflation. That will not happen.
Nova Scotia scrapped its cap-and-trade system after Ottawa deemed it wasn’t efficient enough as is and a provincial spokesperson says Nova Scotia determined the province wasn’t large enough to support a cap-and-trade model like Quebec.
“If we followed that model all the money would have left the province,” said Michelle Stevens, a Director with Communications Nova Scotia.
With the carbon tax, consumers will receive quarterly rebates. How much depends on the province. In Nova Scotia for example, an individual will receive $ 124 dollars while a family of four will get $248 dollars four times a year.
Ottawa argues 8 out of 10 Canadian get more money back than they pay but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation notes that Nova Scotians will be at a loss.
“The carbon tax will cost the average family in Nova Scotia 431 dollars more this year than what they get back in rebates,” said Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “That’s according to the parliamentary budget officer.”
Saint Mary’s University professor Kate Ervine, who works in the Department of Global Development Studies, says dealing with climate change is going to be incredibly expensive.
“But there are real questions around what are the best policy tools to actually achieve the ends of mitigation,” said Ervine
She points out how political leaders and businesses who opt in favour of a carbon pricing model push it as the most effective and efficient way to lower emissions but research suggests otherwise.
"The studies are showing it’s actually very marginal gains you get from that policy and if we want policy that’s consistent with the policy of climate breakdown and where we’re headed we need way more aggressive policy,” Ervine said. “We need to be much more pro-active.”
Ervine says what’s often missing from the polarized and politicized debate around carbon taxes is that Canada and the world is far behind on lowering emissions.
“If you’re going to price carbon, many would say in order to push it past that really marginal impact that is super politicized you should provide rebates to low-income households, to those who are disproportionately impacted but then you should actually use the rest of the revenue to actually fund more aggressively a low carbon transition,” Ervine said.
