Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to address the question of the carbon tax cover-up, as it is being popularly called by Canadians.
The issue at hand is that the government has promised to introduce a nation-wide so-called price on carbon that will rise to $50 per tonne of carbon. That sounds like an academic question, but what it will do, according to finance department documents I have obtained and made public, is lead to a cascading effect of rising prices on consumers, businesses, and families. Naturally, these three groups want to know how much they will have to pay.
That was the subject of my access to information request of the government.
The government responded by indicating it had tables that calculated the cost of a carbon tax on families, depending on their income. It broke households down into five groups, quintiles: the very poor, the poor, the middle class, the upper middle class, and then the rich. The only problem is these tables have no numbers. They are blacked out so nobody can see them, hence the term “carbon tax cover-up”.
We know, based on the admission of the document, that there will be higher prices for consumers, businesses, and families and higher gas prices, home heating prices, and electricity prices. Groceries that are shipped by truck and train will become more expensive. People who are low income will pay disproportionately more because the items taxed form a larger share of their household budgets. Rural people and remote residents will pay more because they have to travel longer distances and, in some cases, they have longer and colder winters during which they must heat their homes.
The question is this. How much more will they have to pay?
There are some people who support carbon taxes, and that is their right. However, most of those people claim they want carbon taxes to be revenue neutral; that is to say that any new taxes Canadians will pay would theoretically be returned to them through offsetting tax reductions. Some say, for example, income taxes could be reduced. The old saying is “We will tax what you burn, not what you earn”. Others say to give it back in the form of rebates, or cheques in the mail.
However, to know whether a family is experiencing a net cost as a result of the carbon tax, we need to know what they are paying for it in the first place. If, for example, a family has to spend $4,000 on carbon taxes, then any government claiming that it is going to neutralize the cost would have to bring in measures to return $4,000 to that same family.
The government was elected on the promise of helping the middle class, but if the middle class is paying more in carbon taxes than getting back in benefits, then the government is doing the opposite of helping. It is harming the middle class. Therefore, to determine which it is, we ask the government to be open and transparent, as it also promised during the election, and release these documents, unredacted, for all eyes to see.