Expanding eligibility
Let us once again indulge the fantasy that politicians care what they promise
We’re back to axing the tax. After six weeks using a CANADA FIRST podium sign, Pierre Poilievre dusted off his AXE THE TAX sign for an event today at Ivaco Rolling Mills in L’Orignal, ON, halfway between Ottawa and Montreal. One presumes he’ll use the full array of podium iconography as an election approaches.
The Conservative leader’s specific proposal is to “axe the entire carbon tax law, including the federal backstop that requires the provinces to impose an industrial carbon tax.” This will permit Canadians to bring home powerful paycheques, as Poilievre likes to say.
It would also eliminate the large-emitter trading systems that the Canadian Climate Institute says are Canada’s most powerful single policy tool for reducing carbon emissions. The industrial carbon price drives four times as much emission reduction as the consumer carbon tax that Mark Carney eliminated (or, Poilievre says, “hid”) on Friday.
Many voters will not care, or will be delighted. Canada’s share of global carbon emissions is small, they’ll say. Successive governments’ efforts to make it smaller have been ineffectual, they’ll say. All taxes are cash grabs, so cutting a tax confers real benefits to Canadians that beat a fantasy benefit to the climate, they’ll say.
Fill your boots, I say, but there appear not to be enough of “them” to win an election. Lisa Raitt believed she lost her seat in 2019, in part, because Andrew Scheer didn’t have enough climate policy to put in the window.
Times have changed, obviously. But even Poilievre thinks he has to say something about reducing emissions. Today what his Conservatives said was this: “Poilievre also promised to use technology, not taxes, to protect our environment by expanding eligibility of the Clean Technology and Clean Manufacturing Investment Tax Credits (ITCs). Heavy industries who make products with lower emissions than the world average will be rewarded, bringing jobs and production home and bringing global emissions down.”
So, to compensate for eliminating Canada’s most effective emissions-reduction mechanism, Poilievre would “expand eligibility” for two existing tax-credit programs. What are the Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit and the Clean Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit? They’re Chrystia Freeland’s gift to climate policy.