The issue isn't the carbon tax — it's climate change

When the going gets tough, political leaders sometimes feel the need to get going. And the scramble for safer ground is not always elegant.

So it was for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh when he tried (again) last week to put some distance between himself and the Liberal government's carbon pricing policies.

Speaking to reporters in Montreal, Singh offered two thoughts on the government's consumer carbon tax. First, he cited his disagreement with the government's decision to exempt home heating oil from the federal fuel levy. Second, he said New Democrats "want to see an approach to fighting the climate crisis where it doesn't put the burden on the backs of working people."

The NDP is hardly alone in quibbling with the exemption for home heating oil that was announced last fall. The wisdom of that change is certainly debatable.

But inconsistency in the Liberal government's approach doesn't compel the NDP to abandon the policy entirely. If New Democrats think the Liberal approach is inconsistent, they could always just promise to eliminate the exemption.

Singh's comment about the "burden" of climate policy suggests a broader rejection of that policy. But that comment also flies in the face of the fact that 90 per cent of the revenue from the fuel levy is rebated to Canadians — the Parliamentary Budget Officer has found that most households, particularly low-income households, receive more from the rebate than they pay in additional costs.

If Singh is ready to oppose the federal carbon tax, he has to explain what he would do instead. The federal fuel charge is projected to account for somewhere between eight and 14 per cent of Canada's emissions reductions between now and 2030. How would Singh make up for that?

The question before Canada's political leaders right now is not whether there should be a carbon tax. It's how Canada is going to reduce its emissions and do its part to fight global climate change.

And while political leaders eagerly line up to criticize the carbon tax, many of the same politicians are failing to answer the bigger question.

The easiest explanation for Singh's equivocation — which deviates from the NDP's campaign platforms in 2019 and 2021, when the party said it would maintain the carbon tax — is the political threat posed by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has loudly and tirelessly campaigned against the federal carbon tax over the last two years.

Speaking to Conservative MPs last Sunday, Poilievre pushed his rhetoric even further, warning of "mass hunger and malnutrition" if the carbon tax continues to increase as scheduled. A higher price on carbon, Poilievre said, would "shut down our entire economy" and result in an economic "nuclear winter." Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's "crazy carbon tax obsession," Poilievre claimed, is an "existential threat to our economy and our way of life."

It might be noted that Conservatives have been warning darkly about the potential impact of a carbon tax since long before there was one. On Sunday, Poilievre said the federal carbon tax — which has now been in place for more than five years — was directly responsible for food bank usage and children going hungry. But the higher food prices of recent years are likely attributable to other factors.

Poilievre's latest argument against the carbon tax draws from economic projections provided to the Parliamentary Budget Officer and released by the federal government this past spring. According to that data, the federal carbon price will reduce Canada's GDP by approximately one per cent in 2030, when it is scheduled to reach $170 per tonne of emissions.

In relaying these findings, Poilievre has said the carbon tax will "blow" a $25 billion "hole" in the Canadian economy. To be clear, that $25 billion "hole" is the difference between Canada's real national GDP in 2030 being $2.688 trillion or $2.663 trillion.