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She dug her heels in because she’s jockying to move up to the provincial legislature. Getting fired is part of building her reputation as a conservative culture warrior. The board really did not want to fire her.
The carbon tax is currently 14.31cents per litre, that’s about 10%. It’s an incentive. To fully wipe out that cost, you don’t need to buy an EV, you could drive 10% less, or buy an ICE vehicle that is 10% more efficient (or some combination). That’s very easy to do in a country where most of us drive large vehicles, and make too many un-combined trips. Drop one trip in 10, or combine it with one of the other 9 and you get to spend your rebate money on beer instead of gasoline.
Subsidies and special taxes are super in-efficient. Besides requiring a whole slew of bureaucracy to administer it, it never applies to everything fairly. That tax you suggest on new ICE vehicles doesn’t dissuade anyone from parking their jacked up f150 one day a week, and it doesn’t reward the person who buys a used car for their commute instead of a used SUV. All those little decisions get incentivized, and they allow people to make their own decisions about how to pollute less, instead of doing the 1 thing some government has decided to be the official, subsidized solution.
We don’t generally build houses of concrete in Canada. Almost entirely stick framed with lumber.
That list shows why the carbon taxes will be the target. Those first 5 account for basically all of the increased cost of living, but they are HARD problems. Not one of those presents a simple policy change that could even make a meaningful dent, and no one agrees on even the general approach governments could take to chip away at those.
However, for the last one, politicians can promise to scrap it or carve it up like a thanksgiving turkey and, despite that having almost no effect on the overall cost of living for the average Canadian, it seems like an easy solution.
The debacle is the MPs and NDP falling for the populism carrot that is carve-outs. It won’t be the last one either. It will always be framed as “helping the old lady keep the heat on” and not what is is - an oil subsidy that keeps people tied to a highly price-volatile and polluting heating source. You can also help that old lady by tweaking the rebate algorithm, but that wouldn’t help out the oil industry near as well.
I think you mean the advent of car culture.
Our current system relies on the economic externality of relying on private vehicles and private transportation on local infrastructure to artificially lower the transportation costs for grocery logistics. It’s much cheaper to run an 18-wheeler to a large grocery store on the edge of suburbia than running box trucks all over town. It doesn’t actually lower food costs, because people pay a large fraction of their income to that private transportation so that they can access that super-grocer, and then the grocer seems to jack up the price of food anyway.
They also like to pretend they care about balanced budgets and monetary supply. Guess what? Taxes both balance the budget AND they evaporate money from circulation, reducing actual inflation. They ignore that because taxes are the ONLY lever that is progressive; where we can spread the pain equitably, asking the wealthy individuals and corporations to pay the largest share. That’s a terrible idea /s
Every time CBC gets budgets cut, it hits CBC radio first and hardest. It’s an extremely small portion of the Federal Government’s budget. This has nothing to do with fiscal restraint, and is purely about neocons who don’t like there being a public owned media source existing at all. They want 100% corporate media and nothing less.
My job getting a new CEO? Getting a new useless figurehead is supposed to scare me? Why? Youtube is going to block me? Why should I care? They either moderate hateful content, or they lose me and a great many others -voluntarily.
Like most people, I avoid companies that platform hate, and am perfectly contented being banned from them if they go that far. That’s not a power they ever didn’t have.
And like several things Douggie has put through, it will ultimately be deemed illegal. That bill is a clear violation of charter rights.
Rural and remote residents already get a slightly larger rebate, and as a city dweller, I think their share should be higher for exactly the reason you state. Also, keep in mind that at night time, which will typically be the only time people end up using resistive heat while on a heat pump, electricity is cheaper. Ontario’s ultra-low off-peak option is even more extreme. It’s probably cheaper to run resistive heat at night, than running the heat pump during peak times.
And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it’s frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is “free” and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.
Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.
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Agreed. The central example is a NDP member being censured by the party for her views. THAT IS WHAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS. She would have also been removed if she started arguing for tax cuts to the wealthy and restrictions on union activity. Even perfectly legitimate political opinions can make you totally unfit to be a representative of a political party. Words have consequences and political parties are social structures with social rules. Cry me a river, this isn’t a free-speech issue.
Agreed. Fuck off with this “we have no free speech” bullshit, substack (and it’s freedom of conscience in Canada in the first place, not free speech). All of the things listed are social consequences, not criminal prosecution or some other government persecution. Sarah was booted by her party, not the government, and the rest are employers and universities. If there is fault, it lies with those organizations.
It’s also not protected speech, so if there is fault, those organizations will have to suffer social consequences themselves, as it doesn’t seem that they broke any laws.
Because they are the party of oil and gas. And because the party of oil and gas has spent the last few decades tying every aspect of Albertan quality of life to O&G profits. The great circle of sludge.
And PP is trying to line things up so the big “cost of living” debate of the next election will be the carbon tax. Out of all the costs of daily living, they will spend their time bickering over the only one that gets rebated.
It’s the least painful, most economically efficient way to encourage those things and other transitions. When it comes to transportation, higher gas prices have historically resulted in a market for more fuel efficiency (and inflation-adjusted low gas prices have lead to oversizing of vehicles). Unlike the 70s, this time, the carbon tax is brought in slowly and smoothly over many years to encourage conservation (including the things you mention), drive demand for more fuel efficiency, and in the long term, encourage the electrification of the remaining fleet.
The vast majority of Canadians want the government to do something serious about climate change, but they don’t know what that thing is. Economists said a carbon tax and rebate was the most efficient, but public support isn’t driven by economic papers, but by propaganda machines. It’s just too easy to blame the carbon tax for everyone’s problems. It’s the perfect boogeyman for inflation. Heavy handed regulation of industrial emitters would probably be the most supported by the public, but it would have a terrible impact on Canadian industry, and actually be limited in it’s effectiveness, as most of Canada’s emissions would still be “free.”