Juno News - May 27, 2019


Another Trudeau tax？ Liberals want to tax your pop


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

176.27144

Word count

781

Sentence count

48


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau's Liberals have never encountered a problem they don't think they can tax their
00:00:06.840 way out of.
00:00:07.960 The latest example, the federal government's pretend attempt at solving the childhood obesity
00:00:13.160 crisis across the country.
00:00:14.780 Their answer?
00:00:15.780 A tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, a tax on pop basically.
00:00:20.000 Now this isn't a new idea, but this is particularly noteworthy because several Liberal MPs are
00:00:25.180 aggressively fighting for this heading into an election.
00:00:28.560 They think that running on the idea of putting a tax on a beverage that millions of Canadians
00:00:33.480 enjoy is going to be both good policy and good politics.
00:00:37.860 This is from a story in CBC.
00:00:39.560 One Toronto MP says she's fighting for it.
00:00:42.600 That's her word, not mine.
00:00:44.320 Mark Holland, another long-time Liberal MP, has said that he's aggressively pursuing this
00:00:48.860 as well, putting forward a proposal advocating for a tax on pop or sweetened fruit juices.
00:00:55.400 And there are a couple of issues with this politically that I'll get to in a moment.
00:00:58.920 But let's start off on the policy itself.
00:01:01.720 Sugar taxes simply don't work.
00:01:04.220 When the UK pursued a very similar policy, they did some polling to gauge what people's
00:01:08.220 habits would be.
00:01:09.220 And it was only a minority that said it would have any impact whatsoever.
00:01:12.880 The actual consequence was that people would continue to buy it.
00:01:16.440 They would just pay more for it, making this a revenue tool rather than something that actually
00:01:22.080 does what the government says it's going to do.
00:01:25.340 And other municipalities and governments that have done this have seen very similar things.
00:01:29.560 Look at Berkeley, California, for example.
00:01:31.880 A study was done with a sugar tax that Berkeley put in.
00:01:34.880 It was done by Duke University.
00:01:37.020 And what it found was that the tax had no effect on obesity or other health-related issues.
00:01:44.000 And that was a one-cent-per-ounce tax that was put forward in 2014.
00:01:48.760 Another example, Philadelphia.
00:01:50.700 What happened in Philadelphia, according to an Oxford economics study, was that beverage
00:01:55.720 sales decreased in Philadelphia by 24%, but in neighboring jurisdictions, they skyrocketed upward.
00:02:03.680 Meaning the actual consumption didn't change.
00:02:06.640 People just found a cheaper option for it.
00:02:09.320 So if Canada were to put in a nationwide sugar tax, maybe people would buy it online, go to
00:02:14.340 Costco.
00:02:15.420 But we know from the evidence that it doesn't deal with the overall consumption issue that
00:02:19.920 the federal government is trying to pretend it will.
00:02:23.620 Most proponents of these taxes will cite Mexico, which had a nationwide soda tax as being the
00:02:29.200 shining beacon of success for this type of policy.
00:02:32.520 But the evidence, again, does not show any impact.
00:02:35.940 In fact, the Mexico Institute of Technology found that a 1% increase in the tax would result
00:02:41.800 in six fewer calories a day.
00:02:44.300 That is about one stalk of celery, I believe, that people were consuming fewer in calories
00:02:51.020 on any given day.
00:02:52.540 Now these are not just isolated examples here.
00:02:54.860 If you take a look in mass, like the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research did, reviewing
00:03:00.140 47 studies regarding sugar taxes.
00:03:04.140 The conclusion, and I'm going to read right from the report here, the evidence base gets
00:03:08.640 weaker further along the chain of intervention logic.
00:03:12.500 If taxes did not have economic costs through deadweight losses and implementation costs, then even
00:03:18.520 a slight causal link between a tax and an improvement in health outcomes might be justified.
00:03:24.780 That, however, is not the case.
00:03:26.780 So what they're saying there is that even if you took away the bureaucracy and costs of
00:03:30.200 administering a tax, you might have a slight change, but you don't.
00:03:35.200 That's fiction.
00:03:36.060 There is no benefit to these sugar taxes.
00:03:39.060 So why then do we have them being sought after by governments that want to embrace and embolden
00:03:44.200 the nanny state?
00:03:45.200 Well, I mentioned at the top that the Liberals have never thought there was a problem that
00:03:48.960 a tax couldn't find their way out of.
00:03:51.120 We saw this with the carbon tax in Ontario.
00:03:54.080 No one's arguing with the fact that there is an obesity issue and that people are perhaps
00:03:59.280 consuming too much in the way of sugar sweetened beverages, but you can't take a chainsaw to
00:04:04.380 deal with a policy that a solution is going to come more from education than taxation.
00:04:10.260 And this is where the Liberals fundamentally don't get the politics.
00:04:12.900 They think that if they go to the Canadian voters and say, we'd like to put a tax on you,
00:04:17.680 they'll be rewarded.
00:04:19.020 That's what they're doing with the carbon tax.
00:04:20.840 And now that's what they're doing with the sugar tax, but people see through it.
00:04:24.340 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.