Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to rise in debate today to talk about the carbon tax and its impact on Canadians. Going further, I want to talk about how I am troubled by debate in Canada where it appears that the government, and some commentators, believe it is a truism that only the carbon tax can lead to GHG reductions. In fact, we hear this idea regularly, including from the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, who said she is so done with Canadians who do not agree with her on this approach.
There is nothing inherent in a carbon tax that actually lowers greenhouse gas emissions. The hope by many economists and by many people like the members of the government is that it will cause people to make “better choices” with respect to their daily lives.
However, I want to show how backward this approach is and how it reflects the fact that, with the exception of perhaps the Minister of Finance, we have a government front bench that is devoid of any serious experience in the private sector economy. The carbon tax is not only unfair to a family struggling with affordability in Ontario and British Columbia, but it is also extremely unfair to fixed-income, single seniors living in Atlantic Canada, where most homes are heated with home heating oil. They are on fixed incomes. They are seeing property taxes and a range of other things going up, and they cannot afford to spend hundreds of dollars more on home heating oil. They cannot afford hundreds of dollars more in higher costs on all the goods and services they purchase. They cannot afford $1.60 gasoline.
What is fundamentally troubling and flawed in the logic on the carbon tax is that so many people working at universities or in the benches of government have virtually zero contact with private sector small and medium-sized businesses in Ontario. They do not realize it is making us uncompetitive. Not only are we going to see job losses; we are also seeing a lack of affordability.
The Ecofiscal Commission suggests that the $50 per tonne price on carbon, which will be fully in place by 2022, will raise $30 billion in tax revenues, basically taking that money out of the economy, out of investment by business, out of households, and away from seniors. These same people are advising the government to go to $200 per tonne before people will make “better choices”, to use the words of our Prime Minister. That would take $100 billion out of our economy, out of the pockets of Canadians, and away from our competitiveness, at a time when the United States is putting more capital and liquidity into its economy by lowering taxes and by making less regulatory intervention in the economy.
As noted economist and public thinker Terence Corcoran said about the carbon tax, “[It is] not a mere a tax grab, it is a multibillion-dollar tax bulldozer rolling through the economy.... ”
Canadians should already be aware that roughly 40¢ to 60¢ of the price at the pump right now is already tax, yet we are still driving, I have noticed, especially in the 416-905 GTA or in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. Can someone who lives in Bowmanville, in my riding, who has to commute to his job in Mississauga across the entire GTA to provide for his family, make better choices? There is no transit available. Moms and dads juggle so many things. They have to get back to pick up the kids for soccer. These are the people I represent. They have to work for their families. “Better choices” from the person living in the ivory tower of the Prime Minister's vantage point shows a radical disconnect.
Also, what if the employer he might work for in Mississauga is an auto parts manufacturer? That auto parts manufacturer in southern Ontario or in Kingston, where my friend is listening from now, competes against suppliers in Michigan, where there is no carbon input price to their competitiveness, where they are lowering taxes. This government has been raising taxes, with payroll taxes and carbon taxes.
Every bank economist has talked about our affordability and our competitiveness with a government that is devoid of a connection with the real world, the real needs of families, the real needs of single seniors. I am going to show why the Liberals' false debate, their creation of the truism that only the carbon tax can help our economy, is a failure of public policy leadership. Instead of standing up and citing her platitudes time and time again, the minister should meet with people in the real economy. I will use an example.
Statistics from the Liberal government for 2016, which was the latest year for which I could get these statistics, say that we have 704 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in our country, 37% of which comes from 596 facilities across the country that are already reporting. Let us compare that.
We have reports for 596 facilities that produce over a third of Canada's total emissions. We could have a targeted regulatory approach to help them step down their emissions without laying people off and without reducing production. We could do that by a targeted sector-by-sector enhanced approach—and I will speak later about how we could do that specifically—or we could do what the Liberal government is doing, which is by regulating the 13,320,610 households in Canada. That is what the Liberals are doing with the carbon tax. That represents 32.8 million people in those households.
A single senior in Kingston is who the government is targeting for its GHG program. Seniors will pay more for home heating, for fuel, for all the goods in their house at a time when property taxes are going up and affordability is going up.
Perhaps when the member was mayor, he lowered property taxes. I do not know, but seniors are not the problem. The government's own documents show us that fewer than 600 facilities account for over a third of the GHG emissions. What is even more striking is that 50% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions come from two sectors: the oil and gas sector and the transportation sector.
I can tell the House right now about a program that is far better than every ridiculous time I hear the minister say the environment and the economy go together. She should understand the economy. She is detached from the real world, calling people who have a different plan for greenhouse gas emissions “climate change deniers”. I have been working on climate change and the environment likely longer than she has, but I have also been in the real economy and I know how we have to tackle these things.
Fifty per cent of our emissions as a country, over 350 megatonnes, are addressed in these two sectors. With the oil and gas sector, we can have two public policy goals to lower emissions. First is capital cost allowance acceleration for any investment that goes to a resource company or a company in the oil sands, one of our largest single contributors to the gross domestic product of Canada. Let us incentivize them to lower their emissions by using the tax system and writing off investments. I said during my leadership run that this approach could actually be extended to water usage too. We could allow any investments they make to depreciate at a faster rate.
Then we could work with those emitters. There are 596 of them. We know where the large emissions are coming from. We could lower their tax rate over a 10-, 15-, 20-year timeline if their emissions are reduced.
In the case of the transportation sector—remember that almost 50% comes from transport and oil and gas—the government has not lobbied for cabotage with our NAFTA modernization. As a result, right now if we make something in Oshawa, Ontario, and ship it to a state in the United States, such as California, because of trucking regulations, that truck has to come back empty. Just think of the wasted efficiency and the wasted GHG emissions. If we are modernizing NAFTA, we should work with President Trump in the U.S. and eliminate this archaic system whereby we have empty transports. In fact, there are hundreds of megatonnes coming from wasted inefficiencies in transport.
David Emerson, a former Liberal cabinet minister, agreed with me at the transportation committee that cabotage would be the single largest move to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as a country. We need cabotage for the transportation sector and a targeted, tailor-made approach using our tax system for the oil and gas and resource sector.
This is about using our tax system as a carrot to incentivize better choices, in the words of the Prime Minister, as opposed to a stick punishing the single seniors, punishing the families, and punishing the small businesses trying to compete. It is about time we had fresh thinking from the government.