Another Trudeau tax？ Liberals want to tax your pop
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176.27144
Summary
Justin Trudeau's Liberals have never encountered a problem they don't think they can tax their way out of. The latest example is the federal government's pretend attempt at solving the childhood obesity crisis across the country. Their answer? A tax on sugary beverages.
Transcript
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Justin Trudeau's Liberals have never encountered a problem they don't think they can tax their
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The latest example, the federal government's pretend attempt at solving the childhood obesity
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A tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, a tax on pop basically.
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Now this isn't a new idea, but this is particularly noteworthy because several Liberal MPs are
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aggressively fighting for this heading into an election.
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They think that running on the idea of putting a tax on a beverage that millions of Canadians
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enjoy is going to be both good policy and good politics.
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Mark Holland, another long-time Liberal MP, has said that he's aggressively pursuing this
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as well, putting forward a proposal advocating for a tax on pop or sweetened fruit juices.
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And there are a couple of issues with this politically that I'll get to in a moment.
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When the UK pursued a very similar policy, they did some polling to gauge what people's
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And it was only a minority that said it would have any impact whatsoever.
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The actual consequence was that people would continue to buy it.
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They would just pay more for it, making this a revenue tool rather than something that actually
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does what the government says it's going to do.
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And other municipalities and governments that have done this have seen very similar things.
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A study was done with a sugar tax that Berkeley put in.
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And what it found was that the tax had no effect on obesity or other health-related issues.
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And that was a one-cent-per-ounce tax that was put forward in 2014.
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What happened in Philadelphia, according to an Oxford economics study, was that beverage
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sales decreased in Philadelphia by 24%, but in neighboring jurisdictions, they skyrocketed upward.
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So if Canada were to put in a nationwide sugar tax, maybe people would buy it online, go to
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But we know from the evidence that it doesn't deal with the overall consumption issue that
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the federal government is trying to pretend it will.
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Most proponents of these taxes will cite Mexico, which had a nationwide soda tax as being the
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shining beacon of success for this type of policy.
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But the evidence, again, does not show any impact.
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In fact, the Mexico Institute of Technology found that a 1% increase in the tax would result
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That is about one stalk of celery, I believe, that people were consuming fewer in calories
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If you take a look in mass, like the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research did, reviewing
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The conclusion, and I'm going to read right from the report here, the evidence base gets
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weaker further along the chain of intervention logic.
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If taxes did not have economic costs through deadweight losses and implementation costs, then even
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a slight causal link between a tax and an improvement in health outcomes might be justified.
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So what they're saying there is that even if you took away the bureaucracy and costs of
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administering a tax, you might have a slight change, but you don't.
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So why then do we have them being sought after by governments that want to embrace and embolden
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Well, I mentioned at the top that the Liberals have never thought there was a problem that
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No one's arguing with the fact that there is an obesity issue and that people are perhaps
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consuming too much in the way of sugar sweetened beverages, but you can't take a chainsaw to
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deal with a policy that a solution is going to come more from education than taxation.
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And this is where the Liberals fundamentally don't get the politics.
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They think that if they go to the Canadian voters and say, we'd like to put a tax on you,
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And now that's what they're doing with the sugar tax, but people see through it.