Q&A | Carbon tax refunds are coming Monday. Here's what you need to know

This year's first round of quarterly carbon rebates are scheduled to pay out to Canadians on Monday.

But Larry Short, a senior wealth advisor with ShortFinancial and IA Private Wealth, says many won't even know the money has arrived — partly because it goes to just one person in a household and isn't identified as the carbon tax rebate by banks.

Short sat down with St. John's Morning Show host Krissy Holmes to discuss misinformation about the rebates and the carbon tax, and how most people would be worse off without it.

Q: We do know the first run of cheques, the Canadian carbon rebate cheques, are coming out next week. I think a lot of people are still scratching their head over whether this is better or worse for them. How do we sort through the rhetoric?

A: Well, I can tell you that 70 per cent of Canadians do hate the carbon tax. [But] 80 per cent of those listening will lose money if the carbon tax is cancelled.

What people are really angry about is not the carbon tax; they're angry that the cost of living has increased, and they think that the carbon tax caused the cost of living to go up.

But it wasn't the carbon tax that drove up a box of Cheerios by two dollars since 2019. It was a coincidence that there was a change in carbon tax in 2019, then we had inflation.

People, in the absence of other information, said it must be the carbon tax because I can see it cost me $0.17 more at the pump, so that must be going through the entire economy and driving up the cost of living. That's not the case.

The clear evidence that it's not the case is the fact that both Australia and the United States had higher inflation over the last number of years than Canada did. And neither of those countries have a carbon tax. Carbon tax contributed 0.15 per cent to the inflation rate when inflation was eight per cent.

Then the other thing that people are completely confused about is everybody gets the rebate. There is nothing to do with how much money that you make. So the prime minister gets the rebate, the leader of the opposition, the premier of the province, everybody gets that rebate, but they don't see it.

And because they don't see it, they don't believe that they get the rebate.

You just said 80 per cent of people will lose money if this goes away. What's happening with those 80 and what happens to the other 20 per cent?

So let's start with why people don't see the rebate to begin with.

It's because it goes out on a quarterly basis. In many cases, it goes into the bank account and it is horribly encoded by the banks.