Dear Editor:
RE: Carbon pricing works, April 18.
With all due respect, the letter recently from Guelph MP Lloyd Longfield is yet another example of how out of touch his government has become with Canadians.
At a time when so many of your own constituents are struggling to put food on the table, to pay bills, to stay housed, your claim that your government’s tax actually puts money into peoples’ accounts is a slap in the face.
I am not sure of the methodology used to calculate the indirect cost of carbon pricing but I would suggest that it is seriously flawed. Every single aspect of our lives has become more expensive, and it doesn’t take an economist to understand that the higher cost of consumer goods is directly related to the higher cost to produce them.
The most frustrating part of carbon pricing is that it is framed essentially as a luxury tax. Heating our homes in the winter is not a luxury. Putting gas in our vehicles to get to work is not a luxury. These are necessities.
And unlike traditional luxury taxes, there are no easy alternatives to pivot to. If you don’t want to pay tax on cigarettes you can quit smoking. Not paying tax on carbon is much more difficult. Full electric heat pump options cost tens of thousands of dollars to install, even after rebates. This is also true for purchasing electric vehicles and installing home chargers.
Your constituency and the surrounding County of Wellington is heavily agricultural. Farmers pay a huge amount in carbon tax that is not rebated. Are they supposed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to retrofit heat pumps for their barns? Are there commercially available electric tractors or combine harvesters that I am unaware of?
To be clear, I am not a climate change denier. I clearly understand the urgency and the need to shift our society to a more sustainable way of living. But you need to understand why the people that you govern feel that the tax is punitive.
Prime Minster Justin Trudeau asked the premiers, “If not carbon pricing, then what?”
My answer is simple. Quit wasting the enormous amount of tax dollars that we already pay, and use the money to reward people for making the shift away from carbon, and don’t punish those who don’t have the means to do so.
Kyle Woods,
Centre Wellington