Madam Speaker, I am pleased to follow up on a question I asked the government in December about the carbon tax and Bill C-234. Notably, the question I asked got over 13 and a half million views on Instagram; clearly, many Canadians are very interested in the issue. It also might have had something to do with the hearty laughter from the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, who was sitting behind me at the time.
The issue is with Bill C-234, which we continue to champion today in this House. Conservatives are fighting for farmers to be exempt from the carbon tax.
We believe in axing the tax completely. However, in this Parliament, in order to make some incremental progress, we have put forward a bill that has gained the support of a majority of the House of Commons, seeking to exempt farmers from the carbon tax.
This bill was on the verge of passing in the Senate when the government started to lean into their supposedly independent senators, making personal phone calls to try to pressure them to change their vote. The bill is now back in the House of Commons, and Conservatives are pushing to pass it in its original form, to exempt our hard-working farmers from the carbon tax.
Applying the carbon tax to farmers does not make any sense even if one believes in the carbon tax in general. The carbon tax is designed to be a Pigovian tax, that is, a tax on something that is believed to generate a negative externality in order to try to discourage that behaviour. That is the theory behind the carbon tax.
It seeks to make gasoline and airplane travel more expensive in the hopes that people will drive less, fly less, etc. That is the theory of the government's carbon tax. However, on what basis is it applied to our farmers?
Does the government hope that people will farm less if it makes farming more expensive? Does it think that farmers should do the essential work of farming less in response to the Pigovian tax that they are applying? It does not make any sense.
Farming is not an activity we want to discourage. Farming is an activity we should be encouraging. We should be making it easier for people to go into farming, to work in farming, to continue with this critical livelihood, feeding people across the country wherever they live.
Why is the government applying a punitive tax on farmers? What possible rational policy objective could taxing farmers in this way have? It just does not make any sense.
To be clear, Conservatives oppose the carbon tax in general. We will axe the tax after the carbon tax election. At a minimum, the Liberals should understand that, even in theory, the carbon tax makes no sense. Even on its own justification, the tax makes no sense when applied to farmers. That is why Conservatives have championed and will continue to champion the passage of Bill C-234, to push the government to pass the bill in its original form.
We have also called on the government to meet with the premiers; along with the Canadian public, they overwhelmingly oppose the carbon tax. Liberals are afraid to gather and meet with the premiers to have a carbon tax conference. I am sure that, if they did, they would clearly hear a call from the premiers to axe the carbon tax on farmers and on all Canadians.