Mr. Speaker, on June 14, I asked the Prime Minister a very specific question. I asked how much the Liberals' new carbon tax would cost Canadians. While Canadians listening to the official reply from the government would have been baffled by the response—an attack on small business, and another payroll tax increase—it is evident from that non-response that the last thing the government wants people to know is how much poorer the Liberals' carbon tax is going to make all Canadians.
When it comes to the Canadian government's talking points on the cost of the new Liberal carbon tax, Canadians know they are hearing government spin. Carbon taxes will become a tax-and-spend grab that lets the government spend ever greater amounts on wacky left-wing experiments in social engineering as it tries to move Canadians ever closer to the dystopian world described by George Orwell in his novel 1984.
I will quote the member for Ottawa Centre from that same question period, as her comments apply to her own non-answers to the legitimate carbon tax cost concerns of Canadians: “it is really sad that we have fake news coming from the other side, misinformation and fake news.” That comment comes from a minister in government whose Prime Minister thinks the novel 1984 is prophecy. The author of that novel, George Orwell, is reported to have said that in a time of universal deceit, truth-telling is a revolutionary act.
For the benefit of Canadians who want to know how much the new Liberal carbon tax will cost them, here is the revolutionary act of providing some cold, hard facts. Using energy consumption data from Statistics Canada and imputing prices from average household expenditure on transportation fuels and provincial gasoline prices, we can calculate the impact of the carbon tax on a typical Canadian household. The costs to households will be significant.
Three provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, will be hit with more than $1,000 in carbon taxation per year to comply with the $50 per tonne carbon tax Ottawa has mandated for 2022.
Nova Scotia, at $1,120, and Alberta, at $1,111, will have the highest bills, followed by Saskatchewan at $1,032, New Brunswick at $963, Newfoundland at $859, and Prince Edward Island at $788. The average household in Ontario will pay $707 a year to comply with the carbon tax once it is fully implemented. But wait, federal, provincial and municipal taxes already make up 44¢ of the average fuel price at the pump in Canada of $1.34 per litre. The reality is that the typical Canadian driver already pays the equivalent of a carbon tax of $200 per tonne, costing more than $28 for a 64-litre fill-up and generating government revenues of $24 billion in 2018.
Ontario ratepayers have been paying a huge carbon tax for years. Itemized as a “global adjustment” on Ontario Hydro One electricity bills, the price paid is at least $8 billion or $655 per tonne of emissions per household. However, it gets worse. Carbon prices must continue to increase sharply to effectively lower emissions. At $100 a tonne, for example, households in Alberta will pay $2,223. In Saskatchewan they will pay $2,065 and in Nova Scotia $2,240.
In fact, at $100 a tonne, the average price for households in all provinces is well in excess of $1,000 per year. In Ontario, a significant number—