Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I think an interesting question would be has the rate of imported products gone up.
We know that the costs of a Carbon Tax have to be born somewhere.
- a few options are increased imports from non carbon taxed jurisdictions
- lower prices for unaffected items as volumes increased.
- The affect of the Carbon tax is within the noise of all the other differences between the provinces.
- decreased demand as a result of people cutting spending in the wake of the economy not improving leading to more competition for fewer consumers driving prices down as businesses moved into losses offsetting increases in costs from the tax.
I’d be interested in much more analysis then just an inflation comparison chart. I suspect within the noise of the data there is no evidence to support either hypothesis. Hopefully he expands with a more detailed work then just the tweet.
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Could be hard to unpick import volumes from Trumps trade war. Western Canada imports are way down in my industry as a side effect of all the trade issues. Costs of raw materials are also pretty hard to link directly to carbon taxes its just to market driven. On the transportation side I would say new laws around driver time logging have had a bigger impact on prices than carbon taxes.