Western Standard - July 07, 2023


Kris Sims of the Canadian taxpayer's federation on the second carbon tax


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

172.89772

Word count

2,579

Sentence count

211


Summary

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

In this episode, we talk about Canada's carbon taxes and how they're costing us big time. We also talk about Alberta's carbon tax and how it's going to affect us at the gas pump and why we should be mad at the government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 You know, you've been warning us about this for quite a long time, and people, I think, don't realize it.
00:00:04.420 But I mean, once they start seeing it actually hitting their wallets, maybe they start to realize that, yes, all these initiatives cost us, and they're costing a lot.
00:00:12.680 Yeah, it costs us big time.
00:00:14.140 So the first carbon tax is still going to be there, and it is still going to triple within the next seven years.
00:00:21.100 So as of right now, it's $0.14 a litre for gasoline, $0.17 a litre for diesel.
00:00:26.240 So on average, you're paying around $15, $16 extra every time you're filling up even a light-duty pickup truck.
00:00:33.940 That's in the first carbon tax.
00:00:35.600 This new carbon tax, the second one that's being layered on top, it's actually fashioned after British Columbia's second carbon tax.
00:00:44.160 Anybody who's ever driven across the Rockies over to B.C. and looked up at the gas pump has gone, holy crap, why is that so much more expensive?
00:00:52.520 Well, two reasons.
00:00:53.320 One, they don't get the discount.
00:00:54.860 So Premier Daniel Smith gives us the provincial fuel tax discount here.
00:00:59.340 So we're saving $0.13 right off the hop.
00:01:01.800 Two, they have a second carbon tax over there, and it's a big one.
00:01:05.380 It's like, you know, $0.15, $0.16 per litre extra.
00:01:09.200 So Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, not kidding, took a look at B.C. and said, huh, that's super awesome.
00:01:15.460 I'm going to do that to the whole country.
00:01:17.340 And so as of July 1st, he's now imposed this government fuel regulation, which penalizes companies for the carbon content of their product.
00:01:27.120 Now, we don't know how much it's going to cost right out of the chute, right?
00:01:31.300 Because it takes a while.
00:01:32.500 So the company gets the cost incurred.
00:01:34.860 They then try to compensate.
00:01:36.620 Some of them might use more ethanol for a little while in their blend, blah, blah, blah.
00:01:41.580 Eventually, though, that cost is going to trickle down to you and me at the gas pump, and we're going to pay for it.
00:01:47.720 So within the next seven years, the parliamentary budget officer says the second carbon tax is going to cost around $0.14 extra per litre of gasoline, around $0.17 extra per litre for diesel.
00:02:00.680 Long story short, Albertan families are going to get hit the hardest.
00:02:04.140 Within the next seven years, Corey, we're going to be out around $3,900 per Alberta family.
00:02:13.100 That's with rebates factored in.
00:02:15.020 That's net cost of Trudeau's two carbon taxes.
00:02:18.160 But, I mean, they're giving it back to us, right?
00:02:19.740 We get rebates, and they just announced, you know, they're going to give us a bunch of breaks on our grocery bills, right?
00:02:24.120 Like, it just cycles through the government, and we all win.
00:02:26.700 Yeah, sure.
00:02:27.440 If only it worked like that.
00:02:29.080 So two things.
00:02:30.500 It's almost insulting for the federal government to think that people are silly enough to think that the government is a magical wealth-producing machine.
00:02:39.640 It's not.
00:02:40.780 All it does is take your money, run it through a bureaucracy, and spit it back at you sometimes.
00:02:46.960 So number one, that cost I just listed was net.
00:02:50.260 That's with the rebates factored in.
00:02:52.540 That's $3,900 with that factored in.
00:02:56.140 So you're out that amount as an Alberta family.
00:02:58.140 Two, just don't take the money in the first place, right?
00:03:03.520 If this is all supposed to make you magically more wealthy, then why are they doing this?
00:03:08.320 The fact is, is they're fibbing.
00:03:09.900 They're not telling the truth.
00:03:11.320 They want gasoline and diesel and natural gas and propane to be unaffordable.
00:03:16.520 That's the feature, not the bug.
00:03:18.980 So every time the politician at the federal government level opens their mouths and says,
00:03:22.920 oh, you're going to get more back than you pay in, number one, that's not true.
00:03:25.980 Number two, that contradicts their entire purpose of their carbon tax, which is meant to punish you for using oil and gas.
00:03:34.160 And it's not working.
00:03:35.400 That's the other thing.
00:03:36.320 I mean, B.C. has been carbon taxing for a long time.
00:03:38.520 You were out there until recently, and I remember you guys would report on that.
00:03:42.640 Emissions have been dropped in B.C.
00:03:44.420 If a carbon tax was going to work, it would have started working by now.
00:03:49.360 100%.
00:03:49.800 So this is where, you know, as somebody, I grew up in the interior mostly, but I spent some of my formative years on Vancouver Island.
00:03:56.780 You know, I get it.
00:03:57.800 I've wandered around barefoot on Gulf Islands.
00:03:59.740 I would describe myself as a small e-environmentalist.
00:04:02.440 I pick up litter every time I'm walking near the river.
00:04:05.320 It's not helping the environment.
00:04:07.160 Like, to slow that down, British Columbia has had the two highest carbon taxes in North America for years.
00:04:16.820 Their emissions keep on going up anyway.
00:04:21.060 This is the government's own data, okay?
00:04:23.880 Now, apart from when people were locked in their homes and stuff at the beginning of 2020 where you saw a dip,
00:04:28.880 other than those weird moments, it goes up and up and up steadily.
00:04:33.060 Why?
00:04:33.460 Because, like you know and all your viewers know, people need to drive to work, they need to heat their home, and they need to eat food.
00:04:42.040 They don't have an affordable, alternative, dependable energy source to switch to.
00:04:48.420 This isn't like paper bags or plastic bags.
00:04:51.360 There's nothing for them to switch to.
00:04:53.440 They have to drive to work, and they usually use natural gas to heat their home.
00:04:57.200 And truckers use diesel, and farmers use diesel and natural gas and propane to both heat their barns and to dry their grain.
00:05:06.640 So, if you increase the cost of that element, of those fuels, you increase the cost of everything, because people can't opt out, right?
00:05:14.700 And so, this is why this is such a brutal punishment for people.
00:05:18.720 And what really gets me going, Corey, is that the parliamentary budget officer themselves, an independent government watchdog, keeps an eye on the budget,
00:05:27.300 says, this hurts low-income people, like single mothers, and fixed-income folks, the worst.
00:05:34.500 It hurts them the most.
00:05:37.540 Because for folks who don't remember what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck, that literally means your paycheck's out there paying for stuff.
00:05:46.820 Everything.
00:05:47.760 Rent, your car payment, groceries, whatever.
00:05:51.180 You increase the cost of one of those essentials, and you're cutting into their food budget.
00:05:56.180 You're making them have to find a cheaper place to live.
00:05:59.060 Good luck.
00:05:59.460 So, that's why it's hurting those folks the most, even with the rebates factored in.
00:06:04.720 And this is where I can't understand why the feds aren't listening.
00:06:08.580 Well, and part of it, too, and you sort of touched a bit on that, is the indirect costs.
00:06:12.720 I mean, we see it at the pump.
00:06:13.840 We see it on our heating bill.
00:06:15.060 But also, the delivery of a lot of products and services to us, retail brick-and-mortar places, they're all paying that as well.
00:06:23.160 And, of course, they have to incorporate that into the prices of the goods and services they provide.
00:06:27.040 So, you still end up paying it down the road for the other consumers of it in the business world.
00:06:33.900 100%.
00:06:34.380 And so, just imagine you are, you know, a store.
00:06:38.240 You're a big store.
00:06:39.340 You have to keep it cool in the summer and heat it in the winter.
00:06:42.900 Most companies would use natural gas to do that.
00:06:46.200 Boom.
00:06:46.560 There's a carbon tax.
00:06:47.420 All those trucks that deliver all the stuff that we eat and use that are backing into their loading bays, those are running on diesel.
00:06:55.760 Those get a carbon tax.
00:06:57.800 And a lot of folks forget, too, that most of our locomotives in Canada run on diesel.
00:07:03.280 It's around $2,400 extra per fill-up of one of those diesel locomotives in the carbon tax alone.
00:07:11.660 That's just the carbon tax.
00:07:12.800 For a big rig truck, like if you've got, you know, a Peterbilt and you've got a couple of those diesel cylinders, that's around $160 extra just in the first carbon tax on diesel.
00:07:24.200 So, that one's going to triple in the next seven years, plus the second carbon tax is going to add more pain.
00:07:30.780 And so, this is where we're, every time a politician opens their mouths about affordability, you should really question them and ask them how seriously they're taking affordability when they're making everything more expensive through the carbon taxes.
00:07:43.360 So, something Dave mentioned before, and then what you and your organization just put out in a release, though, is this carbon tax isn't being applied equally across the country.
00:07:54.640 It appears that we've got a special province that, unsurprisingly, to be honest, is getting a break on it.
00:08:02.140 Guess which one?
00:08:03.140 It's the province of Quebec.
00:08:05.040 I know.
00:08:05.520 Your viewers are shocked, I can tell, at the Western Standard.
00:08:08.720 So, what's interesting here, Corey, is that this is now getting really highlighted, because up until July 1st, Atlantic Canada had a cap-and-trade deal.
00:08:21.120 So, they were paying a much lower carbon tax, I think it was around $0.02 per litre of gasoline, where the rest of us are paying $0.14.
00:08:29.900 Why is that?
00:08:30.840 Well, they have a more energy-intensive economy for heating, blah, blah, blah.
00:08:35.820 Whatever reason they had, they had a cap-and-trade deal, so that they had a slower roll into the mandatory minimum federal carbon tax.
00:08:44.560 Now, that's gone.
00:08:46.880 Boom.
00:08:47.460 Overnight, their cost of their carbon tax went up $0.12 a litre on gasoline.
00:08:53.640 That's a big number.
00:08:55.340 If you're filling up a minivan, that's $10.
00:08:58.340 Boom.
00:08:59.140 Added on to your extra cost overnight.
00:09:01.420 And so, that got a lot of news out that way in Atlantic Canada.
00:09:06.340 And now, it puts into sharp relief the fact that Quebec is the last one standing.
00:09:12.060 They're the last ones that have a cap-and-trade deal.
00:09:14.600 Now, they don't have as good a deal as Atlantic Canada had going for a while.
00:09:18.000 I think they're around $0.10 a litre or so.
00:09:20.060 But they've still got a deal.
00:09:21.780 This is all to say, there should be one rate for the carbon tax across Canada, and it should be zero.
00:09:27.360 Well, that's it.
00:09:29.360 I mean, we could all agree that that would have an equal impact upon every province in the country.
00:09:35.500 But let me play devil's advocate.
00:09:38.080 Sure.
00:09:38.440 Let's assume emissions are going to cause the world to continue burning, and somehow Canada has to do its part in reducing these emissions.
00:09:48.980 If not carbon taxes, what should they do?
00:09:52.700 I mean, that's a fair question that people ask.
00:09:54.240 If they're concerned about the problem, carbon taxes aren't working, then what should the government do?
00:09:59.220 Okay.
00:09:59.600 Totally legit question.
00:10:01.060 And a lot of people care about the environment, myself included.
00:10:03.920 Like, I hand-sewed my baby's cloth diapers.
00:10:06.940 Okay.
00:10:07.100 I take this stuff real seriously.
00:10:08.760 I buy almost all my stuff used because it reduces the impact on the environment, and it doesn't use up resources that don't need to be used.
00:10:16.500 So, I get it.
00:10:17.760 Three things.
00:10:18.540 One, the carbon tax isn't working.
00:10:20.960 Straight up.
00:10:21.760 If that's your issue, if you wake up at three in the morning worried, oh, my gosh, global emissions.
00:10:27.040 Like, it's really upsetting me.
00:10:29.420 The Canadian carbon taxes aren't making a dent in that.
00:10:32.400 Who said that?
00:10:33.880 Actually, it was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it back in 2018, I believe, in French.
00:10:39.880 He said it on the very popular Quebec talk show, Tout le Mans en Parle.
00:10:43.660 And in translation, he basically said, we could shut down everything tomorrow.
00:10:49.120 And what he meant is trucking, heating, eating, like, go die in a cave.
00:10:54.460 We could shut down everything tomorrow, and it wouldn't really make a big difference.
00:10:58.080 Interestingly, the parliamentary budget officer said mostly the same thing, that Canada, and I'm paraphrasing, Canada's emissions are not significant enough to make a dent in global emissions.
00:11:10.100 So, one, it's not working.
00:11:13.480 Even with the carbon taxes, even though British Columbia is one of the most unaffordable places to live on Earth, they're punishing their people.
00:11:19.940 It's still not making a dent, and it's not working because our emissions keep on going up.
00:11:23.600 Two, even if it did, our emissions in Canada don't do enough to really move the needle on global emissions.
00:11:30.840 And three, there are alternatives.
00:11:33.900 So, the tax isn't working.
00:11:35.700 What could we possibly do?
00:11:37.700 And so, we're not the emissions people.
00:11:39.860 We're the tax people.
00:11:41.000 But it kind of seems a little obvious to look at the big end of the arithmetic problem.
00:11:46.420 So, there's about a few hundred million people in India who burn things like wood and animal dung every day.
00:11:54.840 This is according to the Indian government saying this, that this is their fuel source.
00:11:59.360 And they apparently want to switch to cleaner burning sources of energy, like natural gas.
00:12:06.640 We've got a lot of that.
00:12:08.560 So, why doesn't the government look at doing that to really tackle the big end of the arithmetic problem when it comes to global emissions and heavy pollutants?
00:12:17.580 Why not ship them cleaner energy instead of punishing people here in Canada for driving their minivans and buying groceries?
00:12:27.440 Yeah, and if we exported some nice clean liquid natural gas and increased that, they could get some tax revenues.
00:12:33.720 And they could apply that to, say, the unclean drinking water on First Nations reserves or planting more trees in areas where the fires did burn things.
00:12:41.360 It's crazy concepts.
00:12:42.700 But, I mean, they still can't seem to get off the idea that taxes can actually fix things.
00:12:48.660 And this is the thing.
00:12:49.660 Number one, we knew they wouldn't.
00:12:51.420 We were warning them years ago that this wouldn't work.
00:12:54.740 We have a perfect lived example in British Columbia that this does not work.
00:13:00.880 Okay?
00:13:01.220 Even if they try to trot it out and say it'll be revenue neutral, governments are going to government and they're going to cook the books, which is exactly what they did in British Columbia.
00:13:09.440 It was only revenue neutral for a few years before they started skimming.
00:13:13.640 Okay?
00:13:13.980 So we know it doesn't work.
00:13:15.980 We know it's making people poorer.
00:13:17.780 We know it's driving up the cost of living.
00:13:19.500 And we know it's not helping the environment.
00:13:21.820 So, folks, we need to rework this.
00:13:25.620 We need a different approach.
00:13:27.020 And taxes are not it.
00:13:28.940 Well, I knew you guys wouldn't support taxes as an approach anyways.
00:13:32.480 They're pretty unlikely.
00:13:33.620 But all the same, I do appreciate the work you guys do and bringing that to light.
00:13:38.620 Because Canadians don't necessarily see how they're getting it.
00:13:41.240 I noticed, actually, a side note.
00:13:43.220 I threw that out on Twitter.
00:13:44.880 I see another outlet in Canada labeled you guys as an anti-tax organization.
00:13:50.000 So you're anti-taxers.
00:13:51.400 And, boy, the games they play with the terminology.
00:13:54.860 I'll put that on a t-shirt, man.
00:13:57.180 Anti-taxer.
00:13:58.460 We should put that in our swag shop.
00:14:00.380 But, you know, it's one of those things.
00:14:02.320 And I think, I can't remember if it was because of the carbon tax or because of the so-called media bailout and the government funding the media that we got that label on Twitter from that.
00:14:12.800 But either way, taxes, either if it's either the media bailout that they're trying to do and they keep fumbling really badly, like today, or doubling up on our carbon taxes, none of it works.
00:14:25.000 We'll see you next time.