Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
The exemption is ridiculous, but I don't think many natural gas customers would want to trade places. Heating oil is about $1.50/L after the carbon tax is removed. If you convert that to natural gas in terms of heat output, it's the equivalent of paying about $40/GJ for gas.
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And having a lot of elder family living in Newfoundland and knowing how much of their pension goes to heating oil, I actually have a lot of sympathy and understanding for not taxing it. Their options are oil or wood. Sure there is electric pumps, but when the power goes out for a couple of days in a snowstorm that doesn't exactly help.
Seeing people complaining about not getting the same tax easement from natural gas just demonstrates the lack of understanding of the differences in their locations and life positions. I get that it is easy to complain when someone else gets something, but it really isn't comparable. It feels to me a lot like people making $100k a year complaining that they don't get a GST rebate.
But this was a total unforced error on the Liberals part to buy votes. The worst part is that it is just an obvious tactic to buy votes, but now people are using it to question the validity of carbon taxes overall. I see posters on previous pages trying to use it as a gotcha that everything being said about carbon taxation is a lie. In reality, everything is still true today about the CT as it was 8 years ago.. the Liberals aren't admitting that the CT doesn't work, they are admitting they are losing their Atlantic Canada stronghold and buying votes.
And that is the worst part for me. All of the credibility is being buried by partisans wanting to scream that the CT is bad because of this choice by the Liberals, when the choice has nothing to do with the tax itself or how it works.