Another news article I am not sure what to make of. There are just so many levels of complexity to this.
Since the carbon tax comes off one time only, for a one time price reduction. and thus only offset price increases this time only, will we see inflation resuming its normal limb next report?
And will we see price reductions in the supermarket to reflect this? Or was in mainly gasoline for transportation and heating that led the offset?
Also consider that this comes at the expense of the quarterly cheques you were getting. Inflation is looking at cost of a basket of goods but doesn’t “see” the rebate cheques as ever existing.
Plus in May prices were right back up to normal so don’t expect the inflation percentage to stay so low.
Companies immediately started to pocket that extra cash…
This. I’m losing money for sure.
I don’t know how it was in the rest of Canada, but in BC it won’t make a huge difference either way. People in Vancouver and Victoria probably are slightly worse off, people everywhere else are probably saving money now. Last year my family netted maybe $3-400 from the rebate, but only because it was based on income data from the previous year when we both didn’t work as much as usual (parental leave). If it wasn’t removed this year, it would’ve cost us at least $200 (more if the rate went up as it was scheduled to).
That was all based on just gas for commuting to work for ease of math. I also didn’t factor in natural gas heating as being a renter in a shared house I’m not sure exactly how much the tax contributed there.
And what really matters is how much the consumer has left in their pockets when all is said and done.
I, personally, have a hard time believing that producers and corporations aren’t going to increase their prices to make up for this difference. Or take half of the price difference so they can say, ‘look, its cheaper now!’.
AFAIK, the carbon tax was the foremost method from an economic pressure standpoint, to mitigate our carbon emissions. None of the other methods are as cheap to implement nor as economically evenhanded. Typically, higher income individuals emit more carbon, and thus are taxed more, meaning poorer individuals can actually make money off the carbon tax. That obviously doesn’t account for things like inabilities to switch away from propane/gas furnaces, etc, but I don’t know of another method that is as fair.
They already have.
Prices in my town were $1.65, then a week after the tax was removed it went down to $1.34, and three weeks later it was back to $1.63.
I suspect we are still going to see some form of carbon pricing at the individual level. It still exists for the corporate sector, and I suspect it will increase at the corporate level. I do detect a willingness on Carney’s past actions with the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England to not shy away from playing hard ball with industry and business.Someone has to pay for all the damages to infrastructure caused by climate change storm damage.
