[Ronald Pagan]

I hope you feel good after that ill-informed, if not patently false, rant.

Some points of clarification:

A more accurate way would be that emitters will seek out opportunities to maximize profits. They don't necessarily care about costs. Double the cost, but triple the revenue, every business in the world will do that without hesitating.

6to1 half dozen of the other. Your way of stating things isn't 'more accurate' infact it's a more obtuse and flawed way to say minimizing costs. Maximizing profits is inherently an activity of minimizing costs. Why? Because in a competitive market, firms cannot set prices for the goods they sell, they can control the costs of factors of production which will return the highest margins.

Emitters will pass the costs on to consumers immediately. If they still buy it, nothing changes. The only possible way the carbon scam works is if the consumer refuses to buy the product.

Not necessarily. Where there are no substitutes for less carbon intensive goods and demand is quite inelastic then yes most of the costs will be passed onto the consumer. (this is not necessarily a bad thing either from an environmental perspective because it means that these goods will be consumed less with higher prices and emissions to make the goods should reduce)

But, in a market where there are substitutable goods that are more or less carbon intense and where the market is competitive then all of the costs will not be passed onto the consumer.

Liberal brainwashing. We all know who the focus of the Dion's scam is.

Seriously? You seriously can't look more ill-informed and partisan with this kind of garbage.

To reiterate my point, a carbon tax that's applied on all primary fossil fuels is economy-wide. I don't know what definition you have of economy wide but mine is that the tax incidence is spread to the entire economy. If you tax all primary fossil fuels (crude oil, natural gas, coal, coke, and imported fossil fuels) then there isn't a good that's produced in Canada that isn't subject to the tax and there isn't a person who uses fossil fuels for energy that isn't subject to teh tax.

I don't know how else to explain it. If you can't understand that then I seriously overestimated your ability to participate in this debate.

Here I agree with you. The Green Shaft is a bribe for Quebec. Ontario not so much.

Larf, yep. It's all Quebec...

You coudn't sound more cliched-Albertan.

Keep it up. Good for a laugh.