Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to debate a motion from our caucus dealing specifically with the carbon tax cover-up. The government has introduced a national carbon tax, which it is trying to impose on Canadians, even in cases where the provinces object. It is trying to impose that national carbon tax, and it knows how much it will cost Canadians, but it will not tell us. Its approach to so-called transparency today is to release documents with all the relevant information blacked out, so we needed a motion today from the opposition demanding that the government actually tell Canadians how much this policy will cost. Canadians have a right to know how much they will be on the hook for with the misguided carbon-tax policy of the government.
I am going to focus most of my remarks today on deconstructing some of the very bad arguments we hear from the government. For example, yesterday in question period, the parliamentary secretary defended the carbon tax by telling us that he has two children. Well, I have three children. The fact that one needs to reference the number of children one has as the basis, somehow, for caring about the future suggests a certain inadequacy in the parliamentary secretary's argument. There are many people who have children who recognize that the carbon tax is a bad policy. That is perhaps the most obvious example of the government's farcical approach to trying to defend its policy.
Every time we ask the government about the carbon tax policy, it tells us that the environment and the economy go hand in hand. That is sort of like asking for the answer to the ultimate question of life and being told “42”. We have asked what this means. What is the justification for the policy? The environment and the economy, after all, are not physical beings. They do not actually have hands, and therefore, they cannot be, in a strictly physical sense, at least, hand in hand. As such, one must infer that the government is trying to be metaphoric in its justification of this policy when it speaks of the environment and the economy going hand in hand. However, for a metaphor to have meaning, it must have a meaning. Possibly the Liberals mean, when they say this, that one can simultaneously seek economic and environmental improvement. This is uncontroversially true. One can seek to improve the environment and the economy at the same time. Also, by the way, a policy can be simultaneously bad for the economy and bad for the environment. In that sense, we do see the government's policy putting the environment and the economy hand in hand, and walking in the wrong direction. Saying that improvement in one area is not mutually exclusive of improvements in another does not actually offer anything substantive in defence of the Liberals' chosen instrument.
References to children and bad metaphors aside, let us ask what the government's basis is for imposing this carbon tax on Canadians. The Liberals tell us, and I think we have already heard it today, that the carbon tax is the only way for us to meet our Paris targets. This is, of course, objectively false. Many countries that are part of the Paris accord intend to meet their targets without a carbon tax, and indeed, Canada reduced emissions before, under a Conservative government, under a Harper Conservative government, without a carbon tax.
The Liberals today are eager to reference Stephen Harper as much as possible. Two can play at that game. Over the period of the Harper government, emissions went down overall. Thanks to Stephen Harper's leadership, emissions went down, or went up by less, in every single province during those 10 years. Thanks to Harper's policies, the environment improved more than our global partners', while the economy was growing faster than our global partners'. Those are the facts, for the record, and members can check them. If people are still playing this drinking game at home, Harper, Harper, Harper.
Leaving that aside, the Paris accord involves nationally determined targets anyway. One further point to make about a carbon tax is that a carbon tax is a policy instrument specifically designed as incompatible with the realization of predictable targets. That is its nature, and a really elementary point about so-called carbon pricing systems, which members across the way know, or should know. The goal of any system of so-called carbon pricing is to commodify carbon emissions as a thing that must be paid for instead of as a thing that can be done for free.
In the real world, the price of carbon emissions is not just a product of that tax. The price of emitting a tonne of carbon is the tax, plus input costs, minus the economic benefit. If the cost exceeds zero or exceeds the alternatives, it will not be worth the emissions, but if the cost is below, then it will be worth the emissions. As such, raising the price through a tax increase increases the likelihood that the emissions will not be economically worthwhile. However, the specific quantity of emissions is not predictable on the basis of that instrument, because the specific price of those emissions will still be determined, ultimately, by market forces, by considerations of the inputs as well as the value of the output. Therefore, the introduction of a carbon tax, by its very nature, provides absolutely no certainty that we would meet the government's Paris targets, or any targets, because that is just not the nature of the instrument. It is to impose an additional cost burden on the emissions, but it is not tied, and cannot be tied, to the specific realization of targets, except in a speculative, predictive sort of way.
There are other instruments that are, perhaps potentially, more predictive. For example, a cap and trade system fixes the quantity of emissions that are allowable without imposing a direct tax, although, of course, it leads to increased costs. It is another way of imposing those additional costs on the consumer. However, with a cap and trade system, the nature of the instrument fixes the quantity. Imposing an additional tax through a carbon tax shifts the economic calculations businesses make, but it provides no certainty on the impact on emissions. The government's argument that this is designed, by its nature, to allow us to realize the Paris targets is just wrong on its face in terms of the structure of the policy instrument.
The other point to make is that carbon taxes are generally imposed on relatively inelastic goods, such as home heating fuel. One cannot exactly turn the heating fuel off to avoid the carbon tax if it is -30°C outside. That is what economists would call an inelastic good, and generally speaking, our consumption of it is relatively inflexible. Members are pointing out through helpful heckles that, of course, there are things we can do to impact our energy use over the long term. Those things, frankly, are economically advantageous, regardless of whether there is a carbon tax. The real goal of the government should be to give people the capacity, perhaps through tax cuts, to make those kinds of investments in installations. There is no argument that by increasing taxes, people will do something that would have been economically advantageous for them anyway to reduce their heating costs, which is why, vis-à-vis the carbon tax, we are talking about consumption that is relatively inelastic.
Any time a tax is imposed on a relatively inelastic good, there is a high level of cost and economic hardship, yet we are likely to see a relatively lower actual reduction in the use of the thing that has a tax imposed on it. That is another reason this is a bad argument for a bad policy.
Another argument we hear from the government is that we have to something; the opposition wants to do nothing, and the government wants to do something. The government saying that it should do something and talking about the cost of doing nothing avoids the argument about which policy instrument one should actually use.
I think all of us in the House believe that action must be taken. Conservatives champion a different set of policy prescriptions that do not involve imposing massive new taxes on Canadians. However, if we are going to talk about the cost of doing nothing, perhaps we should also talk about the cost of doing the wrong thing. In the name of achieving one objective by choosing a policy instrument that is totally inadequate and totally ineffective and that raises revenue for the government but does not aim effectively at the end one is trying to achieve, one is not any further ahead. Doing the wrong thing in the name of doing something to solve a real problem does not get us any further toward solving the actual problem.
Winston Churchill once said that it is not enough to say that we have done our best: we must know what to do and then do our best. The point we need to debate in the House, which the government continuously avoids, is not whether we need a response to the challenge of climate change but whether this particular policy instrument is the right one. Not only are the Liberals imposing taxes on Canadians, and are not willing to tell us how much that tax will cost Canadians, but they have no credible, rational justification for what they are doing. They are simply eager to impose taxes, new taxes, more taxes, all kinds of taxes, on Canadians every step of the way, even though they have no sense of how this will align with the objectives they have set out.
The government should stop its new tax grab on Canadians. If nothing else, the Liberals should at least tell us how much it will cost. They should end the carbon tax cover-up. They should share the information so that Canadians can debate what is going on. Therefore, this motion needs to pass.