Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this opposition motion. This motion is about transparency, but it is also about the lack of clarity by the government on this carbon tax.
I want to talk a bit about how the carbon tax affects my riding of Peace River—Westlock in northern Alberta. Northern Alberta is a pretty cold place. There are about five days a year over 30°C and the rest of the year is much colder than that. There is about a four-month growing season and beyond that, it is winter, still winter, and almost winter. Those are three seasons in northern Alberta.
When it comes to what the carbon tax costs average Canadian families, my region will be affected more than others because furnaces there run more than anywhere else in the country. In Alberta, natural gas has gone up by one-quarter of the price. It was $3 a gigajoule before and now it is $4 a gigajoule. That translates to hundreds of dollars more every month for heat in northern Alberta, and that is the direct cost to families in heat alone.
The gentleman who spoke before me talked about how the carbon tax would be a direct cost of $500 per family. That is the direct cost, just on heating bills. In northern Alberta, the carbon tax is much more than $500 per family, but maybe that is the average for all of Canada. That seems fair as a direct cost. We do not know, however, because the government has redacted the entire document that the finance department created for this new initiative for a carbon tax in Canada.
It is the other things that trickle down that have a detrimental effect not only on individual Canadian families but our entire economy. The thing about the carbon tax is that it will be put on heating and transportation. Then and there, that makes everything more expensive.
The government runs around and says that it stands up for supply management and the steel industry in Canada, yet it does not seem to realize that a carbon tax will affect all of these communities and industries significantly.
Before I go any further, I forgot to mention that I would love to share my time with the member for Barrie—Innisfil.
I was recently in Sault Ste. Marie. The carbon tax there is a significant competitive disadvantage for the steel industry. The natural gas that goes to Sault Ste. Marie to heat the steel comes from western Canada. It is imperative that the steel industry in Sault Ste. Marie is viable because a huge amount of natural gas from western Canada is sold to Sault Ste. Marie to heat the steel that is used in northern Alberta to drill in the oil patch and produce energy for the entire world.
The cost of the carbon tax is then translated throughout the economy on percentages. Doing business is all about margins and people calculate the margins based on their costs. When the costs increase, margins increase because it is typically a percentage of the cost. When suppliers to particular industries have the increased cost of the carbon tax, they will all increase their rates. We have seen this in Alberta with the trucking companies. When the carbon tax came in, some companies increased their rates by 8%, other companies just added a fuel surcharge, and others added the carbon tax in their basic rates. Shipping to my area is 8% more expensive.
Garbage collection in the town of Falher went up 8%. The town had to redo its budget because the garbage collection company said that the quote it submitted was no longer good because it had to pay the carbon tax. The Town of Whitecourt said that just heating its publicly owned buildings was going to cost $100,000 more a year, just in heat alone. That is exactly why we need—