Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the carbon tax tonight with my colleague across the way. We have had a discussion before.
I have a couple of definitions of rebate, just to get that out of the way first: From Cambridge, a rebate is “an amount of money that was returned to you, especially by the government”; from the Oxford dictionary, it is “a partial refund to someone who has paid too much money for tax”.
We know the flavour of The Hill Times. There was a Hill Times cartoon recently where the Prime Minister was holding a wallet and handing some cash back to a citizen; the citizen looked at it and said, “Isn't that my wallet?” That cartoon spread out, and I have had a lot reaction to it in my constituency. People ask, does the government not understand that it is their money it is giving back, and not all of it? The government took the money from them to begin with; if it did not take the money from them in the first place, it would be of benefit to them. The understanding of a rebate is giving money back that was theirs. It is an interesting concept.
One challenge with carbon tax is some of the issues it has created. People will talk about the cost in agriculture, and we have talked about this before. It is a huge part that agriculture producers face. I have irrigation in my riding, which my colleague knows about well. It is costing huge amounts in the agriculture sector, and there is no rebate back for large producers, which I have in my riding. We are talking about a lot of money.
On the other side of it, people talk about the different kinds of energy that we have. Regarding Alberta wind farms, for example, I have an article here stating that, on a specific day, November 24, 2023, Alberta's 44 wind farms operated at 0.3% capacity. Alternative energy, when we talk about wind and solar, is a bit of a problem, but we still have the carbon tax moving from $65 a tonne to $80 a tonne and then to $170 a tonne by 2030. The Saskatchewan farm producers association figured out that this is $7.42 per acre in 2023 and $17 per acre by 2030. That is a huge amount of money.
The other thing that scientists are beginning to say is that, with advances in technology, they are figuring out that the amount of carbon absorbed by agriculture is huge. It is at the point that people in agriculture should be getting and selling those credits just as solar and wind power operators do. The technology is showing the amount of carbon that agriculture is absorbing is not recognized. It is beyond being equal; it is above equal, and agriculture should even be credited with the amount that wind and solar energy are. Therefore, a huge shift needs to be made in recognition of what the agriculture sector is doing with carbon and how it is being absorbed; those credits could even be sold. Scientists are now recognizing that.
However, the former Greenpeace founder, Patrick Moore, has made some interesting comments. He said, “The idea that wind and solar are going to replace fossil fuels or nuclear or hydroelectric is absolutely insane.” This is Patrick Moore from my generation. He said that there are other things that we need to do, not depend on solar and wind.