Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lakeland.
It gives me great pleasure on behalf of the good people who live in the eastern Ontario riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke to participate in today's debate in support of the motion put forth by my fellow Conservative colleague from eastern Ontario, the hon. member of Parliament for Carleton.
As someone who successfully ran against Stéphane Dion's 2008 carbon tax platform, I find that this debate is a trip down memory lane. I remember very clearly the Liberal candidate who ran against me, although there have been so many I forget their names, showing up at an all-candidates' meeting with a block of firewood, claiming her party had no intention to carbon tax firewood. Her more rabid supporters even claimed that her party would never ban the burning of firewood.
I invite Canadians to read the joint statement made on June 29 by the Prime Minister, the previous U.S. President, and the Mexican President. In addition to pledging to bring in carbon taxes is the promise to get rid of firewood being used to heat homes in rural communities, or ban the burning of firewood.
The Liberals hid their carbon tax, a hidden agenda in the last campaign, having learned the lesson of poor Stéphane Dion, who was so recently kicked under the wheels of the broken promises bus of the Liberal Party. It is no surprise the Liberal government refuses to be open and transparent with Canadians and provide the information my colleague, the member for Carleton, has been requesting and is requesting in today's motion about carbon taxes.
In the province of Ontario, a regressive carbon tax is not something new. The carbon tax in Ontario was authored by the Prime Minister's principal secretary, Gerald Butts. Taxpayers pay it every month as an item on their electricity bill. The Toronto Liberal Party calls it a “global adjustment”.
For Canadians who may be curious as to exactly what the Liberal Party is hiding from Canadians about the destructive nature of carbon taxes, I turn to Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC, and an excellent article on its website entitled, “Be afraid: The brains behind Ontario's energy disaster are now running the country”. The author then asks, “Phasing out coal, a feverish pursuit of green energy, new tax regimes—where have we all heard this before?”
Posted December 7, 2016, by Graeme Gordon, it sets out in clear language the carbon tax controversy in Ontario and what Canadians can expect with the same person in charge in Ottawa. Quoting the CBC:
It is uncontroversial to call Ontario's energy situation a disaster. As [the liberal Premier] has herself conceded: Ontarians are now having to choose between paying the electricity bill and buying food or paying rent.
The article then clearly points out who was responsible for the carbon tax on electricity fiasco in Ontario, the Prime Minister's top adviser, Gerald Butts.
...it was former premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal team from 2003 to 2012—including his former principal secretary and “policy guru” Gerald Butts—who set Ontario onto this financially bleak, dead-end road. And now, Butts is headed on the same path, leading not the Premier, but the Prime Minister, on the way down.
Butts was, according to the Toronto Star, “the man they call 'the brains behind the operation” and the “policy architect of the Liberal government since 2003.”
Butts departed from McGuinty's government in 2008, but not before he and the Ontario Liberal team set the stage for the ill-fated Green Energy Act, in part, by signing onto dubious wind power projects and its cripplingly inefficient Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP).
Let us be clear, as the CBC pointed out:
Butts himself takes—credit for initially enacting and seeing through those energy policies.
As the Toronto Star reported in 2012, “On his biography page at the WWF website, Butts cites how he was 'intimately' involved with the McGuinty government's environmental initiatives.” Another Canadian Press article made it clear that Ontario's energy policy was Butts' design, “McGuinty's plan came from his senior adviser, Gerald Butts.”
Butts has graduated to the halls of Parliament Hill as [the Prime Minister's] own principal secretary, leaving behind a province still paying the price, literally, for his tenure. His promise to eliminate coal, for example—a worthy gambit, if done fiscally responsibly—cost Ontario consumers an extra $37 billion between 2006 and 2014, according to an auditor general, and is expected to cost another $133 billion from 2015 to 2032.
Let us read what else the CBC had to say about Gerald Butts:
Now he's doubling down, via the prime minister, on his green energy gambit by promising to enact carbon pricing regimes (read: tax) on all provinces by 2018 and phasing out coal by 2030, even as our neighbour and biggest competitor [the United States] moves in the opposite direction. How team...[Butts] sees a carbon-priced Canada competing against the U.S. on an off-kilter playing field confounds most people's common sense....
The federal Liberals, under the stewardship of Butts, has already run a projected $30 billion deficit in its first year in office.
This comes after promising a $10 billion deficit for each of the first three years. It is a $60 billion broken promise.
Phasing out all coal by 2030 will have a cost that will add to that deficit. (This sounds awfully familiar, no?) Forcing carbon taxes on all Canadians by 2018 will, in theory, be a revenue generator for Canada, yet it also promises to eat up more of Canadians' paycheques, and potentially trigger businesses to flee to greener (and cheaper) pastures down south—a phenomenon that is of real and pressing concern for Ontario's government.
The CBC article finishes with the following warning for all Canadians:
The architects of Ontario's energy fiasco are now stationed in the PMO. The whole country should be wary of the financial disaster of that province being replicated nationwide.
What could be in the finance department's own documents that are so damaging to the Liberal Party's flagship policy of carbon taxes that the Liberals are afraid to share it with Canadians?
To get an idea of what the documents reveal, Canadians need look no further than the report of Ontario's auditor general on the new set of carbon taxes brought in by the Toronto Liberal Party under the direction of the federal Liberal Party. According to the non-partisan auditor general, cap and trade carbon taxes, which kicked in at the beginning of 2017, will cost Ontarians billions of dollars in additional heating and transportation charges. They will lead to even higher electricity rate increases than are already expected, send billions of dollars out of the Ontario economy, and vastly overstate any environmental benefits.
The AG's report adds to what other critics of carbon tax policies have been saying all along. The biggest winner from the policy will be Toronto, which will have the power to create and distribute any number of credits it wishes and use any revenue from the program to fund a suite of pet projects that will have little to no environmental benefits.
The auditor general highlighted that carbon taxes in Ontario come at a major cost for the province's households and businesses, which are already struggling from the fastest electricity rate increases anywhere in North America. Between 2017 and 2020, households and businesses will be burdened with even higher taxes. The annual direct and indirect costs to the average household will rise to $285 by 2019. Households that drive more miles will pay more. As to the impact on rural and northern households, which are already suffering from high energy costs, either the information has not been analyzed by the province or, as with the Liberal Party in Ottawa, it is not being released to consumers. Cap and trade carbon tax pricing will make electricity price hikes worse for industrial customers, also according to the auditor general.
Perhaps the province will use the billions of dollars in proceeds of its carbon credit options as a subsidy to lower hydro bills. By 2030, large industrial customers will experience a 7% increase in their electricity rate, which is directly attributable to cap and trade carbon pricing. This price hike is over and above the increases the province has already laid out in its long-term energy plan.
Contrary to the vapid talking points prepared by Gerald Butts for the Minister of Environment, carbon taxes are bad for the economy. In Ontario, the Liberal carbon tax on electricity has eliminated more than 400,000 good, well-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector. Carbon taxes hurt the less advantaged the most. Carbon taxes lead directly to higher commodity prices, higher electricity bills, and a reduction of job opportunities.
The Minister of Environment should throw away her silly PMO/Gerald Butts talking points and take a look at what is really happening in Europe, in Germany. German households paid a renewable surcharge of 7.2 billion euros in the latest year.