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Trudeau gov’t has spent nearly $200 million on carbon tax paperwork since 2019: report
From LifeSiteNews
” the Trudeau government was forced to reveal that the tax cost Canadians $82,628,993 last year to collect and then to mail out rebate cheques. The Trudeau government assigned 474 employees to carbon tax paperwork ”
The carbon tax cost Canadians nearly $200 million in paperwork since Parliament introduced the fuel charge in 2019.
According to new records published December 7 by Blacklock’s Reporter, the Liberal government under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent $199.2 million in taxpayer money on federal administration costs for the carbon tax.
“What were the annual costs to administer collection of the carbon tax and rebate program?” Conservative MP Chris Warkentin questioned in the House of Commons.
In response, the Trudeau government was forced to reveal that the tax cost Canadians $82,628,993 last year to collect and then to mail out rebate cheques. The Trudeau government assigned 474 employees to carbon tax paperwork.
While the Canada Revenue Agency had initially only hired a few employees to manage the carbon tax, the payroll expanded sevenfold after the Trudeau government decided to mail out rebates instead of allowing Canadians to file for the tax credit in their annual returns.
Accordingly, in 2022 there were only 33 employees assigned to the rebate program, but in 2023 the number had risen to 242. Similarly, the total cost of managing the tax rebates increased from $4.3 million in 2022 to $48.6 million in 2023.
Despite the high cost, the Liberal government has maintained that the carbon tax is necessary and the “most efficient” way to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“Carbon pricing is central to our climate plan because it is the most efficient and lowest cost policy to reduce greenhouse gas pollution,” Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault claimed last February. “The cost of doing nothing is staggering.”
Similarly, Trudeau defended the cost of collecting the tax last June, saying, “Everyone except apparently the Conservatives understands building in price signals on things we do not want like pollution is one of the most efficient ways of reducing emissions.”
In 2022, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson claimed that 99% of economists agreed on the efficiency of the carbon taxes; however, he failed to cite any paperwork to back up his assertions.
“With respect to the price on pollution, if we asked 100 economists 99 will tell us it is the most efficient way to reduce emissions,” Wilkinson said.
The carbon tax, framed as a way to reduce carbon emissions, has cost Canadians hundreds more annually despite rebates.
The increased costs are only expected to rise, as a recent report revealed that a carbon tax of more than $350 per tonne is needed to reach Trudeau’s net-zero goals by 2050.
Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $65 per tonne, but the Trudeau government has a goal of $170 per tonne by 2030.
In October, Trudeau announced that he was pausing the collection of the carbon tax on home heating oil for three years, a provision that primarily benefits the Liberal-held Atlantic provinces. The current cost of the carbon tax on home heating fuel is 17 cents per liter. Most Canadians, however, heat their homes with clean-burning natural gas will not be exempted from the carbon tax.
Despite both Canadians and politicians supporting carbon tax exemptions for all, Trudeau and his government refuse to provide relief.
The government’s current environmental goals – in lockstep with the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” – include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades.
The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet members are involved.
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Author: Franco Terrazzano
This tax costs Canadians big time at the gas pump, on home heating bills, on the farm and at the dinner table.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the federal government to scrap the carbon tax in light of newly released government data showing the tax will cost the Canadian economy about $25 billion in 2030.
“Once again, we see the government’s own data showing what hardworking Canadians already know: the carbon tax costs Canada big time,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “The carbon tax makes the necessities of life more expensive and it will cost our economy billions of dollars.
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must scrap his carbon tax now.”
The government of Canada released modelling showing the cost of the carbon tax on the Canadian economy Thursday.
“The country’s GDP is expected to be about $25 billion lower in 2030 due to carbon pricing than it would be otherwise,” reports the Globe and Mail.
Canada contributes about 1.5 per cent of global emissions.
Government data shows emissions are going up in Canada. In 2022, the latest year of data, emissions in Canada were 708 megatonnes of CO2, an increase of 9.3 megatonnes from 2021.
The federal carbon tax currently costs 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
The carbon tax adds about $13 to the cost of filling up a minivan, about $20 to the cost of filling up a pickup truck and about $200 to the cost of filling up a big rig truck with diesel.
Farmers are charged the carbon tax for heating their barns and drying grains with natural gas and propane. The carbon tax will cost Canadian farmers $1 billion by 2030, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
“No matter how many times this government tries to put lipstick on the carbon tax pig, the reality is clear,” said Kris Sims, CTF Alberta Director. “This tax costs Canadians big time at the gas pump, on home heating bills, on the farm and at the dinner table. Trudeau should make life more affordable and improve the Canadian economy by scrapping his carbon tax.”
From Heartland Daily News
By Joshua Loucks for the Cato Institute.
Energy producers will be subject to retroactive taxes in New York if the state assembly passes Senate Bill S2129A, known as the “Climate Change Superfund Act.” The superfund legislation seeks to impose a retroactive tax on energy companies that have emitted greenhouse gases (GHGs) and operated within the state over the last seventy years.
If passed, the new law will impose $75 billion in repayment fees for “historical polluters,” who lawmakers assert are primarily responsible for climate change damages within the state. The state will “assign liability to and require compensation from companies commensurate with their emissions” over the last “70 years or more.” The bill would establish a standard of strict liability, stating that “companies are required to pay into the fund because the use of their products caused the pollution. No finding of wrongdoing is required.”
New York is not alone in this effort. Superfunds built on retroactive taxes on GHG emissions are becoming increasingly popular. Vermont recently enacted similar legislation, S.259 (Act 122), titled the “Climate Superfund Act,” in which the state also retroactively taxes energy producers for historic emissions. Similar bills have also been introduced in Maryland and Massachusetts.
Climate superfund legislation seems to have one purpose: to raise revenue by taxing a politically unpopular industry. Under the New York law, fossil fuel‐producing energy companies would be taxed billions of dollars retroactively for engaging in legal and necessary behavior. For example, the seventy‐year retroactive tax would conceivably apply to any company—going back to 1954—that used fossil fuels to generate electricity or produced fuel for New York drivers.
The typical “economic efficiency” arguments for taxing an externality go out the window with the New York and Vermont approach, for at least two reasons. First, the goal of a blackboard or textbook approach to a carbon tax is to internalize the GHG externality. To apply such a tax accurately, the government would need to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC).
Unfortunately, estimating the SCC is methodologically complex and open to wide ranges of estimates. As a result, the SCC is theoretically very useful but practically impossible to calculate with any reasonable degree of precision.
Second, the retroactive nature of these climate superfunds undermines the very incentives a textbook tax on externalities would promote. A carbon tax’s central feature is that it is intended to reduce externalities from current and future activity by changing incentives. However, by imposing retroactive taxes, the New York and Vermont legislation will not impact emitters’ future behavior in a way that mimics a textbook carbon tax or improves economic outcomes.
Arbitrary and retroactive taxes can, however, raise prices for consumers by increasing policy uncertainty, affecting firm profitability, and reducing investment (or causing investors to flee GHG‐emitting industries in the state altogether). Residents in both New York and Vermont already pay over 30 percent more than the US average in residential electricity prices, and this legislation will not lower these costs to consumers.
Climate superfunds are not a serious attempt to solve environmental challenges but rather a way to raise government revenue while unfairly punishing an entire industry (one whose actions the New York legislation claims “have been unconscionable, closely reflecting the strategy of denial, deflection, and delay used by the tobacco industry”).
Fossil fuel companies enabled GHG emissions, of course, but they also empowered significant growth, mobility, and prosperity. The punitive nature of the policy is laid bare by the fact that neither New York nor Vermont used a generic SCC or an evidentiary proceeding to calculate precise damages.
Finally, establishing a standard in which “no finding of wrongdoing is required” to levy fines against historical actions that were (and still are) legally permitted sets a dangerous precedent for what governments can do, not only to businesses that have produced fossil fuels but also to individuals who have consumed them.
Cato research associate Joshua Loucks contributed to this post.
Originally published by the Cato Institute. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
