Carbon Tax? Better Not Risk It!

The price of gasoline in New Brunswick has hit $1.30 a liter. Diesel fuel goes at ~$1.50. That's high enough even for a non-driving fellow like me to notice. Because there's more to it than just the number.

There are fuel surcharges. Not only airlines, but shipping companies too now charge them on top of the posted rates. It's certain that bus fares will go up in a few month time - there's no way the city transit will make ends meet otherwise. Food prices - They just keep climbing as it becomes more and more expensive to ship goods to the stores. And thanks God the winter is finally over, because the price of heating oil too went up 15-20% over the last few months...

Could anyone seriously claim that the situation isn't bad enough as it is; that the fuel prices aren't high enough without carbon taxes? Could anyone be sure that those carbon taxes would actually be absorbed by the businesses, rather than passed along to the consumers? That the "carbon tax" will be truly "revenue-neutral"? Really?

Promising that a new tax will be revenue-neutral has about the same credibility to begin with as a realtor's pledge that your new home is just 15 minutes from downtown or a carmaker's promise that your new SUV will get 20 kilometres a litre in the city and 30 km on the highway. But coming from Dion, the vigorous opponent of carbon taxes, the pledge of revenue neutrality is even less believable than usual.

Also, Brian Mulroney pledged that the GST would be revenue-neutral, and we all know how that song and dance ended.

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And here's another thing about carbon tax that rarely gets mentioned:

A fundamental component of the debate has been ignored so far though and that is whether a tax on the sixth element of the periodic table is really such a good idea after all. For example, I relayed a report late last year on how an obsessive academic from Australia proposed the sick ideal of putting a carbon tax on each baby born into the world and a yearly tax on children for the first years of their lives. As we have our national government apologizing for the Chinese head tax of almost 100 years ago, calling the practice a shameful blemish from our past, eco-liberals are gearing up to add a tax that doesn’t discriminate on race necessarily but on simply existing. The professor was never quite clear on what would happen if families either refused or could not afford to pay the tax, although he was certainly joyous in announcing how this would effectively womens’ (and mens’) right to chose to have their babies (something liberals often love to do except when they know the choice will result in one less life in the world).

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The air we breathe out is 5% carbon dioxide. If we can tax the carbon emissions from our cars - who can guarantee that carbon emissions from our bodies will never be taxed?