Juno News - February 02, 2024PBO report says GST on carbon tax will cost Canadians billions
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Summary
The carbon tax is the gift that keeps on giving, not for Canadian taxpayers, but certainly for shows that try to respect the Canadian taxpayers. The PBO has confirmed that the carbon tax will cost Canadians $500 million a year in 2019 alone, and that's just the first of many ways that Canadians are being fleeced by the tax on their carbon emissions.
Transcript
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As I mentioned, we're flirting with the boundaries of time and space, if not outright pushing
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them, but we are still going to keep with tradition as, well, that's what we do here
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on the Andrew Lawton Show anyway, or so I've declared just now.
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And on the Monday shows, we always check in with our very good friend, Chris Sims, who
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is the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
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And Chris, it is always, always wonderful to talk to you.
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This is, I mean, you and I, the carbon tax is the gift that keeps on giving, not for Canadian
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taxpayers, but certainly for shows that try to respect the Canadian taxpayers.
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This report came out late last week that the Parliamentary Budget Office, as I understand,
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has confirmed, I mean, I think you could probably intuit this, but they've confirmed that it
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That's not the carbon tax, that's the GST on the carbon tax.
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I feel like I'm misreading that number, but that's a 500 million a year just on the tax
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And there's certain evergreen things that we get through email at the Taxpayers Federation.
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Most of it is about accountability or somebody personally struggling with their tax load.
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But one of the frequent flyers is, oh my goodness, I'm paying a tax on the tax.
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So it's quite easy to see on your home heating bill, for example, or if you get propane tanks
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filled up outside of your trailer, if you live in a mobile home, take a look at the receipt.
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The sales tax, the GST is added after the carbon tax.
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That means that the GST is on top of the carbon tax in addition to.
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And so we've been preaching and teaching about this now for years, but it feels really validating
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to have the Parliamentary Budget Office, which is an arm's length, independent, nonpartisan
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group that is supposed to watchdog the government, saying, yes, Canadians are spending close to
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half a billion dollars per year with the GST on the carbon tax.
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And by the year 2030, Andrew, this made my eyes pop out.
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It's going to be around a billion dollars a year.
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I mean, the idea of a tax on a tax is incredibly offensive because the point of a sales tax,
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if we're going to endorse that that's a legitimate revenue collection tool for government,
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is that it is taxing a good or a service of which a tax is neither.
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I mean, just go back to in Ontario, where I'm from, before we had the harmonized sales
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tax, you had a PST, which was the Ontario sales tax of 8%.
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And then you had the GST, which for a time was 7%.
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Imagine if they did not apply those taxes simultaneously.
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They put the GST on, so your $100 purchase is now $105, and then they put the PST on top
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So now you're paying 8% on the 105 instead of 8% on the 100.
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On the carbon tax, I think the government's trying to just conceal this from people because
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To really put it like, okay, if I bought this piece, this roll of tape, okay, at the store,
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I pay, not in Alberta, I don't pay a provincial sales tax, but I pay 5% federal sales tax because
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So if that was $1, you pay $1.05 because of that 5% GST.
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But a tax is just this amorphous, blood-sucking action of government.
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In fact, a lot of people ask us, isn't this illegal?
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I personally would love to see a clear declaration or a ruling coming from a high court somewhere
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I think what they're trying to get around here is that the government tries to call this
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a carbon pricing mechanism or a pollution reduction mechanism.
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We had part of that fight at the Supreme Court a few months ago.
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Well, anybody who's paying the carbon tax certainly knows that this is a tax.
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And now, again, having the PBO come out and say in cold dollars and cents, this is how
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They should be emailing their member of parliament, phoning their member of parliament saying,
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how dare you be fleecing us for an extra half billion dollars per year so you can go wasted
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on some nonsense like hockey rinks or overseas trips on a tax.
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I find right now that the opposition is very susceptible and very open to listening to
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people when it comes to affordability and tax ripoffs.
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So now is the time to get your opposition MPs up in arms over this stuff to make them commit
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to scrapping this stuff once they're in government, if they become government.
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I mean, obviously, this is an explicit tax on a tax here.
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But there's also a more hidden and admittedly more oblique tax on a tax because the whole
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point of the carbon tax is that it increases the price of everything.
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There are a lot of down market carbon taxes that are baked in.
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So, for example, if you buy an orange from the grocery store that had to be shipped there
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and the vessel and the truck that had to ship you those oranges, they had to pay more in
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Well, that carbon tax that they paid is buried in the apple driving up that price.
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And then again, the sales tax on that increased price.
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So the point of that is not to just confuse people, but to say it compounds.
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I mean, at every level of the supply chain that has a carbon tax that it has to pay, that's
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And then the sales tax is getting put on all of that.
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As Andrew just explained, folks, keep like picture it in your mind.
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Grocery costs, I realize, aren't always sales tax, but the point stands generally.
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Because you've baked in the carbon tax there, for sure.
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So like picture an apple coming from the Okanagan of British Columbia, okay?
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Picture that person who has to drive there when they're picking it, paying the carbon tax.
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And now keep in mind that quite often we'll use barns, right?
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If you're a farmer, say you've got a poultry barn or a pork barn, farmers right now still
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need to pay the carbon tax on their barn heating, and they have to pay it for drying their grain.
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There's the baseline of your food chain where the carbon tax kicks in.
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And now you add the trucking to the grocery store.
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Now add the natural gas to keep the lights on and the heat running or the air conditioning
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A lot of people forget that our trains, which haul so many things across our country, use
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So this is where you're getting this layer cake from hell when it comes to the carbon tax.
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And so this is why it's really important that the parliamentary budget officer has done two
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Again, the CTF has been sounding the alarm for years, but coming from an independent watchdog
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like this is so valuable, even with the rebates factored in, the average family in Alberta for
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the year 2024 is going to be out more than $900 this year.
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And that is relating to everything Andrew and I just described.
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Of all that layer cake coming from the carbon tax and applying it to the average family in
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And again, that's with those rebates factored in.
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The very idea that we could give money to the government and they could magically somehow
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increase its wealth and make it worth more and give more back than you pay in is nonsense.
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But to have the PBO do these two things of pointing out the net cost of the carbon tax
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and the GST ripoff on top of the carbon tax is really important.
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And in fact, we'd like to see all parties get on board with this.
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A little note, we're noticing some movement at the provincial level from the NDP.
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We're seeing, for example, in Saskatchewan, the opposition NDP saying, you know what,
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we shouldn't be carbon taxed on our home heating.
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We're seeing Wob Canu, the NDP premier of Manitoba saying very similar things and fully
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Oh, I mean, look, when the government's carve out for Atlantic Canada was one of its biggest
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tactical blunders because they had basically beaten the provinces into submission on the
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And then when they did that, all of a sudden, everyone who had an NDP government in Manitoba
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and even, you know, NDP leaners in Alberta, Saskatchewan were looking at their leaders
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Jack Layton, the late leader of the federal NDP, said it would be wrong to punish people
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Folks should go back and read that, including sitting members of parliament within the NDP
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who are propping up this government and supporting home heating fuel carbon taxes.
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I wanted to turn to a bit of a better story here.
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I began the show talking about this climate change free speech trial I'm covering in Washington,
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But we have this vilification of the oil and gas sector by a lot of sectors of the Canadian
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political establishment, certainly by the federal government and by many in the media.
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Well, it was a bit refreshing for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to declare that she wanted to
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She did this in her sit down with Tucker Carlson last week.
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It might have been in Calgary or it might have been both for all I know.
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Now, first off, can the Premier make that commitment?
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So the government doesn't, you know, we don't have crown corporations that are solely monopolistically
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pulling oil out of the ground or mining it as bitumen.
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They would they would get into squabbles and yeah, it wouldn't work.
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So she can declare this as a goal and say that's what she wants to see and encourage
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The problem here, though, is how much of an obstacle is the federal government going to
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We've already seen that the government fully thinks that they have full control over natural
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resources in Alberta and we're just supposed to bow to their bidding.
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And we recently had a great Supreme Court decision on the pipelines issue there, too.
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And it also inspires confidence in companies because, of course, they want to come here
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Or if they're already here, they want to realise that they have a pro-business premier and they
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Again, though, the devil's always in the details.
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Can we actually get this happening without the federal government trying to strangle us?
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What I just like from a tactical point of view is how much attention that gets.
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So for her to sit there with somebody with the reach of Tucker Carlson and obviously triggering
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the reactions of some members of parliament and ministers in the federal government to
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the point where they have to hold a press conference.
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I actually heard, by the way, I don't know if you saw this, Andrew, I actually heard
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it was an NDP strategist say that he should have been stopped at the border.
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Well, yeah, it's the Emergencies Act approach, basically.
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We don't like what they're going to say, so let's just use these weird legal tools to
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But just use a thought process experiment here.
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Imagine Rachel Motley is still leader of the NDP.
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Imagine she invites MSNBC's Rachel Maddow up to Alberta and they have a talk and there's
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people that come to the arena and they listen to, I don't know, solar blenders and e-bikes
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Can you imagine like people saying she should be stopped at the border?
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Like, I don't care if you agree with the person saying that's the whole point of free
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But to say somebody should be stopped at the border really opened my eyes quite a bit.
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So I think this is part of the reason why Premier Smith made that statement.
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And look, when I was in Davos, not this year, but last year, I ran into Joe Manchin, who's
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a senator who is a Democrat in West Virginia, but he's the most right-leaning Democrat, certainly
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He was one Jason Kenney brought him up to tour the oil sands.
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And he was saying, Senator Manchin, like, yeah, you know, I would love it if the United
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States were saying we want to buy all this Canadian oil.
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So that's the real danger here is that you have a Premier, Daniel Smith, who's saying,
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But you have these, I mean, to appropriate Paul Yev's term, these gatekeepers, both at
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the Canadian government federally, the provincial government in BC and provincial government
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in Quebec that are doing everything they can to landlock Canadian energy.
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And for the folks who are watching this, for whom emissions is their key issue, like it
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keeps them up at night, this is actually one of the best paths to reducing global emissions.
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So the United States of America reduced its emissions without carbon taxes.
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They did so largely by expanding natural gas production, which has far fewer emissions than
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And again, this is something Premier Smith has said independently.
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This is something other political leaders have said independently.
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Places like India are desperately asking to purchase our natural gas.
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And that will also have the great benefit of reducing their very heavy global emissions.
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So this is the non-carbon tax path forward to doing that exactly.
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And as a great side bonus, you're employing lots of Canadians under very strong labor laws
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So it was really interesting to see her smile and say, yeah, let's double the production.
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I think she was trying to provoke a little bit more conversation there.
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I mean, all of the people that were, you know, clutching their pearls about how dare she
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take the stage with a guy that filled out two stadia there was actually like they weren't even debating
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and discussing the things that she was saying there, because I think there was nothing
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And if you're in Alberta and your lifeblood is the thriving of that sector, absolutely.
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Chris Sims, we will check in with you next week.
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.