Quote:
Originally Posted by iggy_oi
The bolded portion seems to contradict the first sentence in your statement. The carbon tax is a tax is it not?
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My objection is tying the existence of the Carbon tax to the outcome of getting the green line. The two are unrelated.
The decision around a Carbon tax should be do we want to curtail the use of Carbon and slowly shift people away from Carbon. If the answer is yes than you implement a Carbon tax AND reduce other taxes accordingly. The implementation of a Carbon Tax should be revenue neutral and sized according to how quickly you would like to incentivise change along with the difficulty in making changes.
Then on the spending side of the government you decide which projects need funding and how much revenue need and set your suite of taxes at an appropriate level to fund those needs.
The key here is that if the Green line was necessary whether or not we have a Carbon tax is immaterial. The project should have been funded.
The same with people arguing against the Carbon tax. The argument against the Carbon tax isn't that its a tax hike. Its that this specific form of tax is more harmful than another form of tax. It is independent of the how much tax question.
A Carbon tax, A PST, Income Tax, property tax have to be assessed based on the affects of that type of tax vs the alternative types of taxes and not based on the increase or decrease in government revenue as a result of the implementation of the tax. The type of tax and the amount of tax are two completely different issues that our politicians continue to fail at distinguishing between.
So to summarize:
We got the Green Line because the NDP raised taxes.
Whether a Carbon tax harms or hurts Canadians depends on the basket of goods they buy relative to the average Canadians basket of goods. And without an export exemption or an import tariff hurts Canadian companies competitiveness in high carbon industries but could help Canadian companies in low carbon industries