This article was written by Andrew Phillips and was published in the Toronto Star on March 15, 2024.

The consumer carbon tax is dying in Canada — and with it dies a rare and admirable attempt to treat voters as adults.

Carbon pricing will clearly be dead if Pierre (“axe the tax”) Poilievre and his Conservatives win the next federal election, as seems almost certain at this point. Even before that, it’s dying a slow death as premiers line up to demand its demise, or at least head off any increase.

The Trudeau government has lost the political battle over the carbon tax, aided in no small part by an own goal last fall when it exempted home heating oil. That was obviously a political sop to the Atlantic provinces and it sparked a predictable free-for-all of premiers demanding similar concessions.

But I still give the Liberals A for effort on carbon pricing. In a world where governments typically refuse to play it straight with voters, going with a consumer levy on greenhouse gases was that rare thing — a policy that didn’t treat Canadians like children who can’t be trusted with the truth.

The truth isn’t very complicated: climate change is a big problem and any course of action we choose to tackle it — including doing nothing — will involve significant costs. The question isn’t whether there will be costs, but how big they’ll be and how they’re shared.

Given all that, the usual course for government would be to play down the costs and — most important — hide them from voters/consumers as best they can.

So, they would impose regulations on business to require carbon-saving measures. Or subsidize various industries to “go green” and favour one particular technology over another. They’d shower consumers with tax breaks to save energy — another form of subsidies for business. Or, most likely, a combination of those things.

What they wouldn’t tell you, at least not up-front, is that all those subsidies and regulations and tax breaks cost money — and you’re ultimately the one who pays. Either by business passing on higher costs to consumers or taxpayers footing the bill for subsidies and tax “expenditures.”

The Trudeau government is doing a lot of that, but it also chose to impose a carbon tax directly on consumers (combined, of course, with a rebate scheme that leaves most Canadians better off in the end). The carbon tax, it says, accounts for a third of GHG reductions in its 2030 climate plan.

The key thing about a consumer carbon tax is that it’s highly visible. Everyone can see it. And everyone can draw a direct line between that tax and higher fuel prices. Indeed, that’s the point. The theory is that once you know using more carbon-rich fuels costs you more, you’ll use less. It’s called harnessing the power of the market.

Think about that: instead of hiding the cost of fighting climate change in a maze of regulations, subsidies and tax breaks that are impossible for a non-expert to understand, the government made a deliberate decision to make a big chunk of those costs easy to see. It in effect trusted Canadians to understand that fighting climate change involves real costs and to accept that they have a part to play. To treat them as adults, in other words.

I call that admirable. Others may call it politically stupid. Quite likely, it’ll turn out to be both.

For a while, the government’s strategy worked. Inflation was almost non-existent and carbon pricing started off low. But once inflation bit and “affordability” became everyone’s No. 1 concern, the rising carbon price was hanging out there as an easy target for populist politicians. (Never mind that it accounts for just a tiny fraction of higher prices.)

Dumping the consumer carbon tax implies one of two things. Either a Conservative government will give up any serious attempt to fight climate change or it will rely even more heavily on those subsidies, regulations and tax gimmicks that hide the cost from voters. Ironically, though, they’re less efficient than carbon pricing and will impose higher costs overall on the economy.

Either way, it will be the end of trusting voters with the truth. Maybe they don’t want it after all.

Instead of hiding the cost of fighting climate change in a maze of regulations, subsidies and tax breaks, the Trudeau government made a big chunk of those costs easy to see, effectively treating Canadians like adults