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[https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/bonokoski-trudeau-liberals-carbon-tax-too-good-to-be-true
Trudeau Liberals' Carbon Tax Too Good To Be True
Mark Bonokoski
October 24, 2018
Our prime minister, who obviously didn’t go to school solely for recess, has just created what is surely the best tax the world has ever seen - one that takes money away and then gives it all back, with a little extra thrown in for the inconvenience.
It almost sounds too good to be true.
If this is punishment for the provinces that have rejected his version of a carbon tax, and have yet to table a suitable plan of their own - Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick - then surely the rest of the provinces and territories in our great dominion will be soon begging Justin Trudeau for access to the same sort of windfall.
Unless, spare the thought, that it really is too good to be true.
The Trudeau Liberals do not call the new carbon tax a carbon tax, of course, and shy away from using the word rebate.
They call it, instead, a Climate Action Plan, and refer to rebates as Climate Action Incentive Payments.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford would hear none of it. He called Trudeau’s supposed non-tax on carbon a “massive tax” on carbon, a “punishing” tax, and a “job-killing” tax that would do diddly squat to save the environment, especially when Canada is guilty of only 1.6% or the world’s greenhouse gases.
What Ford said doesn’t sound too good, but it does sound true.
As Halloween rolls closer, remember when Trudeau showed up on Parliament Hill last year wearing slicked-back hair and black horn-rimmed glasses like Clark Kent, only to open his shirt to reveal his Superman garb?
Well, that is how he truly sees himself, and he is out to save the world come hell or high water, shell-game chicanery, sleight-of-hand trickery or a carbon tax by any other name.
So, he lectures us as if we’re all dim-witted pollution machines who don’t live in the Great White North, who don’t have to heat our homes in the long Canadians winters, who don’t have to drive to and from work because public transit is not the best, even where it exists, and hectors us if we do not fully buy into the bill of goods he is selling.
Same with Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who has absolutely no time for anyone who wants to argue to the contrary and, while it is condescending to call her “Climate Barbie,” it will be an unfortunate behind-her-back nickname that will stick because of her intransigent belief in her infallibility when she has her Superman at her side.
So, what’s the bottom line on this?
Well, numbers from the Trudeau Liberals claim their non-carbon-tax-tax will cost a typical family of four in Ontario an additional $244 a year, but that they will get back approximately $300 in “climate incentive payments” when they file their income taxes.
A similar family in Saskatchewan will get a seemingly whopping sum of almost $600, presumably because they have fewer options when it comes to their virtually unavoidable reliance on fossil fuels.
Sending actual cheques in the mail, which would have all the realistic optics of buying votes, was yanked from the Trudeau-Liberals’ initial plan at the 11th hour to spare them the political grief of a spade being called a spade.
Why this convoluted policy?
Well again, according to the Liberals, carbon pricing will have consumers backing off from more expensive pollution creation - that they will crank down the thermostats in their homes, drive less to reflect the four-cents-a-litre hike come April when the plan kicks in, et cetera.
But, let’s face it, the entire Liberal plan is a hoax.
It is too good to be true.
markbonokoski@gmail.com
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