Well, it’s April, so you know what that means — it’s time for another episode of the great Canadian carbon tax tantrum.
It’s true that Pierre Poilievre has made wailing about carbon pricing more of a year-round behaviour, but the price hike on April 1 is always a key date on the calendar. An annoying annual ritual when climate advocates are tipped onto the defensive, no matter how convinced they are that pricing can deliver deep carbon cuts. Public debate becomes consumed with the cost of changing course, ignoring the costs of the course we’re on.
This year, Canada’s carbon price rose to $65 per tonne. That’s getting sizable even if it’s lower than the going rate in Norway (about $100) and less than half of Sweden’s ($156). The current world leader is Uruguay, a country that charges $180, already well above Canada’s plan for $170 by the end of the decade.
We drive the most-polluting vehicles in the world and rank only behind Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for CO2 spew per capita. Climate casualties are mounting and yet, every year, we are subjected to a spasm of political petulance, parsing whether rebates (“Climate Action Incentive Payments”) are big enough to offset the costs for only the poorest or most or just some Canadians.
And this year, the detractors really spit the dummy, hurling around a selective reading of a report by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO). You will have seen the headlines: a “senseless money grab,” railed the National Post; “more pain at the pump” declared CTV; the Toronto Sun blared: “Only April Fools believe carbon tax hike won't cost more.”
The extra outburst this year comes from a projection by the PBO that — if you ignore the economic impacts of climate change and you hypothesize an imaginary world without climate policy — the carbon price and rebate system may be a “net cost” to households … by 2030.
Even then, the rebates will be worth more than most households pay in carbon pricing, says the PBO. The “net cost” projection results from a separate exercise aimed at predicting the broader economic future.
It all gets a bit complicated but given the hullabaloo, it’s worth unpacking. The PBO exercise makes at least three sketchy assumptions: there would be no climate programs to replace carbon pricing, no economic benefits from climate action and, crucially, it “does not attempt to account for the economic and environmental costs of climate change.”
An odd thing to leave off the accounts for a climate policy. Especially since the PBO itself released just such an accounting six months ago.
“Our analysis shows that climate change has — and will continue — to negatively impact the Canadian economy,” said Yves Giroux, parliamentary budget officer when he released that report last November.
Climate impacts have already depressed the Canadian economy, the economic impacts will continue to deepen and, without increasingly aggressive action, the costs will climb even higher, said the PBO at the time: “If climate policies remain closer to the status quo, the long-term impact of climate change on the Canadian economy will be larger.”
Economic impacts do move some minds, but they mask the human tragedies. We might ask the residents of Lytton, B.C. about impacts. Except that, nearly two years after it burned to the ground, Lytton still has no residents. Rebuilding has yet to begin. (Tyler Olsen published a tremendous article on the situation last week, quite an insight into the state of climate preparedness and “resiliency.”)
So maybe stick to sterile dollar figures for a moment. Is it still too soon to mention the $9-billion Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016? How about $4 billion from Fiona in Atlantic Canada or $17 billion for the 2021 juggernaut of heat dome, fires and floods in B.C.?
“By 2050, losses could rise to $100 billion and wipe out half a million jobs,” according to Don Drummond, TD’s former chief economist and the Canadian Climate Institute’s Sarah Miller.
“We underestimate the economic benefits of proactive climate policy,” they wrote. Instead, we “debate the costs of action rather than the costs of inaction.”
And let’s not limit our calculations to just what can be calculated. Despite the actuaries’ best efforts, lives and lives destroyed don’t track onto a balance sheet. Whether Canadian lives or those of people in East Africa, or Pakistan or island states, a growing number of impacts are simply, horrifically incalculable.