The New Democrats say they will back the Conservatives on a motion to pull the carbon price off all home heating until after the next election.
I do not support this. They never should have pulled it off anything.
We’ve been telling people to go electric for years to be better off, and they just ignored it.
Ah, yeah, I’ll just trade in my 2001 Volkswagen for a new EV. Easy. Thanks.
Edit: I missed that this was specific to home heating. My bad.
I get it, my 2010 Ranger gets 8L/100km, why would I trade that in for a $60k new car?
My EV gets about 15kwh/100km average over the whole year (including heating)
That works out to around $2.25 per 100km vs $14.80 for your vehicle at current prices in BC.
That’s a savings of over $12k per 100,000 km.
The difference between the gas and EV version of my vehicle was $25k, so anything over 200,000km is saving me money compared to having purchased a gas car. If gas prices go up over the next 10 years, I will save even more.
That being said, you probably shouldn’t get rid of a functional gas vehicle until it doesn’t work any more or becomes prohibitive to maintain.
Also my EV is fun to drive.
If they sold an EV compact pickup I would get one tomorrow but the Lightning is a joke, it’s a minivan with an uncovered trunk. And with a 25km commute it’s gonna take a long time for EV savings to catch up with a $10k truck :/
@nik282000 @BlameThePeacock Did you mean $100k?
Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.
And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it’s frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is “free” and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.
Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.
That’s fair, but not everyone CAN do that even if they want to
Exactly, you can throw all the incentives you want at me and I’d be happy to switch today, but my landlords don’t care because they’re not the ones paying the carbon tax.
Or…you can throw all the rebates you want at it but people still have to put up the initial value
And those who can’t are also producing less carbon overall and therefore getting more back from the carbon rebate program.
The issue is those that cannot make the switch to electric also aren’t in the best spot to pay thr carbon tax. It’s a catch 22 for the poor. Ending the carbon tax for now is a good thing since those that could switched to electric and those that couldn’t won’t be punished.
for now
Weasel words to sneak a change in. Once it’s the incumbent state, no one’s going to change it back.
Classic conservative shenanigans.
Ending the carbon tax now would result in them having less money available.
That doesn’t actually help them.
It’s a typical conservative talking point. Take a complex system, make it sound simple, pitch a simple solution (that in reality won’t fix anything and actually usually makes thing worse), people who don’t understand the complex system latch onto the simple solution, then when the simple solution is implemented it doesn’t fix anything but no one questions why.
We see his with conservatives time and time and time again, it’s sooo frustrating. I wish the economy was as simple as they claim it is.
How would ending the carbon tax end up with then having less money. A tax directly affecting them ending would give them more money to work into their budget. This is a simple cause and effect. The only people with less money is the government, which lets be honest the carbon tax on heating homes was never a large portion of their budget.
I would guess it’s because ending the carbon tax would end the payment people get paid from it. Majority of people profit from it.
The carbon tax isn’t a traditional tax, the money collected is pooled and paid back out evenly to households.
This means as long as a household is producing less carbon than the average, they get more money back from the rebate then they paid into it.
High income people still currently produce significantly more carbon than poorer households. The last time I looked at the numbers, something like 60% of households got more money back from the program, and nearly all poorer households fall into that.
Yes there are likely outlier poorer households who also produce way more carbon, but when looking at the system overall they are the exception and could likely fix their situation by changing their behaviour.
To reiterate, this is not a tax because the income doesn’t go into the governments income, reducing the income tax has no impact on government revenue. The majority of poorer households get more money back from the carbon rebate system.
At this point the gov needs to overhaul the tax code tbh.
Very disappointed to see the federal NDP backing the climate-denying #Conservatives in attacking the carbon tax on natural gas heating.
Canada’s carbon tax is (mostly) revenue neutral - if you’ve average heating needs, you break even. So cutting it on heating is a de-facto subsidy on large, inefficient homes.
Revenue neutral carbon taxes won a Nobel prize in economics. Anybody with alternate ideas on fighting climate change: show me your Nobel prize.
But the modern NDP is left-populist. They want simple, brute-force top-down solutions to problems. They’re big believers in “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Any level of indirection in policy solutions is bad.
If unions didn’t exist today, and Liberals proposed them as a solution for protecting workers, NDP would scream “no, we want direct top-down government workplace inspections, don’t you dare charge me union dues!”
When obviously: do both. Both the econ-based bottom-up program and the top-down legislation.
If they want to reduce the tax on oil, they could make heating fuels a flat rate per BTU (or gigajoule, we’re metric).
Natural gas (CH₄) is 0.0373 GJ/m³. It’s also carbon priced $0.1239/m³ – this amounts to $3.32 per GJ.
Fun coincidence - there’s about as much energy in an L of fuel oil as in an m³ of CH₄ - 0.0383 GJ/L.
Currently, heating oil CTax is $0.17/L. Pricing it per-GJ would reduce the CTax on a litre of heating oil to about the same as an m³ of CH₄ – $0.127/L CTax.
Obviously pricing per GJoule of fossil-fuel would be a de-facto subsidy on less-efficient heating fuels, but it would mean the incentive is not to upgrade from oil to gas, but to upgrade to zero-emissions forms of heating like heat pumps.
And it would be a 33% discount on heating oil CTax, so rural people on heating oil would no longer feel “punished” by the CTax - they’re paying the same per unit of heat.
Of course, this assumes rural grievance is rational.
well said.
The carbon tax is the lightest touch, least effort possible for addressing climate change, and to say “yea, but lets cancel it” is just kicking the can down the road for another 5 years.
I heat via natural gas, and pay the carbon tax to do so. I’m ok with that.
