Only An Uneducated Society Would Believe A Carbon Tax Fights Climate Change

The Liberals and their media allies have spent a lot of energy marketing the Carbon Tax as a “price on pollution” instead of another gas tax. Public support for Trudeau’s fairy tale thinking on environmental matters relies heavily on an Orwellian relationship with the truth and widespread public illiteracy on economic matters.

The obvious big lie surrounding the Carbon Tax is that the Liberals claim that you will make money off of it. They have somewhat modified that claim to now 8 out of 10 households to play on the Left-wing populist “tax the rich” sentiment, but anyone who understands the matter knows the real number is 0 out of 10.

Even the Trudeau Liberals had a momentary burst of truth and economic understanding when they said that the purpose of a tax is to make something more expensive and therefore disincentivize it. However, that was all thrown out the window to make way for the “you will make money off this tax” with their household Carbon Tax rebate. 

There is one glaring flaw in the logic behind the Carbon Tax, energy is an inelastic good. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics to know the Carbon Tax is a terrible idea. You just need someone who paid attention to day two of 11th-grade ECON class.

After you learn about supply and demand, i.e the higher the demand the higher the price, and the higher the supply the lower the price, you learn about the next factor in determining the price point: the elasticity of a good. Goods that are more elastic are ones where demand is highly affected by price like video games. If the price of video games doubles, the demand for them will plummet dramatically since no one needs a video game. But if the price of food doubles, the demand is still the same since everyone needs to eat, making food an inelastic good.

Energy is another inelastic good meaning the amount you would need to tax it before people stop using it is insanely high. The “goal” of the Carbon Tax, in its most charitable terms, is to put so much pressure on middle-class families that they can not afford a car to drive to work so they are forced to sell it and wake up a few hours earlier to bike to work each morning. Which is which “price on pollution” is a better marketing ploy than “drive middle-class families into poverty to save the planet”.

There is another glaring problem with the Carbon Tax. Gas and energy prices are factored into literally every other product in our economy. Fuel is necessary for growing all of our food and everything made has to be transported from point A to B at some point. Therefore an increase in the price of energy will increase the price of everything else.

While Canada is facing an inflation crisis there is no better way to make it worse instantly than to hike the Carbon Tax as Trudeau has done today.

The real villains of the Carbon Tax debacle, it could be argued, are not the Liberals, but the “Conservatives” who understand everything in this article but are too cowardly to stand on truth and reason. Patrick Brown started this madness inside the party, Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay followed him off this cliff and now Jean Charest is the Carbon Tax supporting front runner in the CPC leadership race.

If Canada is to survive the coming financial crisis it will need a leader who can clearly articulate the insanity of these Liberal policies based on magical thinking. Jean Charest gaining leadership of the Conservative Party would doom the country to endless poverty.