STIRLING: Carbon tax shell game — how climate activists masquerading as ‘experts’ are bankrupting Canada

On February 3, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said in the House of Commons that “Canadians deserve to have a full stomach, a full fridge, and a full bank account, all at once.” He went on to offer his theory that Canada has the highest food inflation in the G7 due to the industrial carbon tax and fuel taxes. He asked Prime Minister Mark Carney for his theory. The Prime Minister responded that the Canadian Climate Institute “estimated the impact of the industrial carbon tax on food prices as approximately zero.”.In fact, the Canadian Climate Institute is an almost wholly government-funded registered charity which has received some $30 million from the federal government and is staffed by well-known climate activists. Perhaps the Minister of Environment Canada can better inform this conversation. On December 11, the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainability met to hear testimony from the Honourable Minister Julie Dabrusin on industrial carbon pricing. This meeting received no mainstream media press, as far as I know, but it should have.Conservative MP David Bexte began the questioning by asking the minister to provide a figure for the cost of the industrial carbon tax. She quickly pointed out that this is not a tax as the money that industry pays for what is known as the Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS) goes back to each province to a fund meant to stimulate clean tech or related R&D. He agreed to call it a ‘levy.’ For the next few minutes, it was like pulling teeth. Bexte tried to get Dabrusin to provide some ballpark national figure of the economic value/impact of the industrial carbon pricing scheme.She could not … or would not say. Ironically, Dabrusin called Bexte obstructionist on climate action when she would not even answer a simple question; she claimed it was too complex to calculate. Somehow Professor Wei Cui of UBC was able to calculate an estimated figure up in this paper titled “Understanding Output-based Pricing Systems.”He estimates that "in recent years" OBPS systems in Canada (i.e. the federal one and the provincial ones in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia) collectively raised over $2 billion annually. People should remember that Quebec is not part of the OBPS system; instead, it has a cap-and-trade arrangement with California..Indeed, in contrast to Minister Dabrusin’s insistence that this is not a carbon tax, Cui writes of the $2 billion. “While this figure could have been even higher if there had not been traded, or simply banked, emission credits, it needs to be remembered that OBPS does not “allocate” allowances and there is no possibility of revenue from auctioning. These figures thus offer a reminder that OBPS are, in the first place, a form of carbon tax regime.” And of course, these billions in costs to industry are passed on to consumers, meaning higher food prices and a rise in the cost of other goods and operations. Minister Dabrusin claimed that “We have a moral obligation and an economic imperative…” to impose an industrial carbon pricing system because we must think of our children’s climate future. She claimed that all of our top 10 trade partners, except the United States, are going to implement a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). CBAM is a tariff on goods from jurisdictions that don't have carbon dioxide emissions abatement mechanisms (including requirements for emissions accounting) equivalent to those of the importing jurisdiction. This is intended to prevent ‘carbon leakage.’ Dabrusin’s international trade theory is that if Canada has a substantial industrial carbon price, then the Canadian supplier does not have to pay the CBAM tariff. She did not mention that CBAM requires that the producer provide expensive and burdensome detailed Scope 1 (direct), 2 (indirect), and 3 (from supply chain) emissions reports and independent verification — all of which are “cash-in” make-work processes for accountants and compliance companies, but that don’t produce anything of value. However, they do massively run up operation costs and legal liabilities for real or perceived reporting errors. .For a country with a desperate and dying economy, on life-support, as reported on February 3 by BNN Bloomberg from Rosenberg Research, do we not have a moral obligation and economic imperative to make common sense climate policy decisions? Is it truly in our interests to enforce an industrial carbon tax and the mandatory counting and reporting of carbon molecules?Our export trade with the US in January of 2025, for example, was $58.1 billion for that month. The export trade with our next largest trading partner that month, China, was only $3 billion. Though China is about to institute some kind of CBAM, the US has left the Paris Agreement and President Trump is dismantling every climate regulation as fast as he can. Minister Dabrusin was asked if we would meet our climate targets. She evaded the question and said we need to be ambitious. I suspect there is a plan afoot to impose Article 6 international carbon trading (Internationally transferred mitigation outcomes — ITMO) somehow and this is why the Liberals are clinging to these catastrophic climate goals and economy-crushing climate ideology. I think we have a moral obligation and an economic imperative to stop that, and it must start with Minister Dabrusin being accountable for misleading the public. And no, we won’t meet our climate targets, unless we engage in the fantasy of carbon markets which entail, “the lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no one.” (“Conning the Climate” by Mark Schapiro, Harper’s Magazine, February 2010)