Mr. Speaker, it is a little over a week before another terrible April Fool's trick by the Liberal Prime Minister will be played on Canadians. The illusion that he would like everyone in Canada to believe is that the carbon tax is dead and buried, but what the Liberal Prime Minister is not coming clean with Canadians on, and what he does not like to talk about, is the fact that the industrial carbon tax is still lurking behind the shadows, and on April 1, that carbon tax is set to go up to $110 a tonne. Right now, it is about $95 a tonne. That is almost a 16% increase.
That industrial carbon tax trickles down to consumers in so many different ways. Every company in Canada that produces something, and every company, business and factory that uses energy, has to pay that carbon tax. Those costs get passed down to consumers. Every farmer who buys fertilizer and equipment, who has to pay for fuel to haul back and forth between the grain elevator and the terminal or who picks up supplies and inputs as we enter the growing season, has to pay that carbon tax. All of that gets passed on to consumers. The truckers who have to transport goods from the processing centres to the distributors have to pay that carbon tax.
In fact, when the industrial carbon tax was set at $40 a tonne, just a few years ago, studies showed that the effect of that on a Toronto to Montreal food haul added about $2,000 a year to the cost of just the trucking. That does not include any of the processing or energy costs that those companies involved in making or processing food pay. That is just the transportation alone, and that was at $40 a tonne. On April 1, when that jumps to $110 a tonne, that represents almost a threefold increase to the industrial carbon tax from just a few years ago.
I said that the industrial carbon tax was lurking in the shadows, and I use the word “shadow” for a very specific reason. It is because the Liberal Prime Minister, before he ran for Liberal leader, was often out on the world stage saying the problem with the carbon tax was that people noticed it. He actually said this over and over again in interviews, on panels and in his book Values: Building a Better World for All. He said that the consumer carbon tax was divisive and that people saw it when they filled up their cars with gas and when they paid their utility bills, so his solution was to hide it. He actually said in an interview that the right way to do it was to take it off of the receipts that Canadians had to pay and bury it on the back end. He literally said that we need, in effect, a shadow carbon tax, and that is exactly what he has done.
He wrote that book Values, and I reference that book for a reason. If I had written a book called “Values” where I defined myself as a human being on almost a moral level and professed my love of a carbon tax and my desire to leave oil and gas in the ground, when I decided to run for politics, people might not believe me if I suddenly claimed to have had a conversion and disavowed everything I had ever written.
The Liberal Prime Minister does not want to develop our natural resources. He believes in the radical, most extreme form of net zero, which would leave our natural resources in the ground. He actually said in an interview with the media that the best course of action for Canada is to leave up to 50% of our natural resources in the ground.
Why will the government not finish the job and eliminate the industrial carbon tax so that Canadians do not have to pay this useless tax on the consumer side or the industrial side?