As a new paper from University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter shows, Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices. As Tombe noted in a long thread on social media, “that’s a tiny fraction of the 26 per cent rise in food prices in Canada over the past five years.”
This is important and useful academic research. It also comes limping along about three years too late to really matter in the grander scheme of things. Canadians are increasingly opposed to the carbon tax, and increasingly willing to blame it for the increase in food prices that has rocked households and economies across the developed world.
That’s largely a function of the Conservative Party of Canada’s aggressive campaign to paint the carbon tax as the source of all of Canada’s problems — and, by extension, their victory in the next election as the natural solution to them. There is no carbon tax correlation too spurious for the Conservatives to draw here, whether it’s rising food bank usage or declining per-capita economic prosperity.
It’s not “conservative voters”. It’s people struggling under the weight of corporate robbery. When your life keeps getting harder and harder, you are more and more likely to accept the easy, empty answers, and direct your anger and hurt at whatever convenient target manipulators point at.
People are bombarded by this manipulation. It shows up everywhere they’re logged in.
So, people who lack critical thinking. Trudeau has concisely and accurately described the carbon tax. Poilievre has used lies and hyperbole about it. Rather than spending even a minute to compare the two stances, they choose to accept the statements of the guy who will “save” them from this “crippling” tax, for absolutely no benefit to himself. 🙄
And I get it. Taxes suck. Almost as much as poverty, lack of education, poor health, and a collapsing climate. But taxes are a great solution to fix those problems. And Poilievre, and conservatives in general, have put no effort in to fix any of those problems, but they are very fond of banging on the drum of high taxes and their desire to reduce those. So take a guess how that ends.
If a person legitimately had a solution and wanted to implement it, they wouldn’t do so by spending 30 years trying to become Prime Minister. Political parties and party leaders don’t have solutions because they don’t deal in solutions. Government doesn’t fix things, it either helps us, or hinders us, but in the 21st century is entirely up to us.
Those are the same thing, just everyone below a certain EQ gets to be in both groups and the sub-group is labeled “hurt me more daddy”.