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No doubt this is the case. But the assumption underlying Conservative charges of “cover-up” would appear to be that this information is available only to the federal government — as if it and it alone had the ability to calculate the impact of carbon pricing on the final costs of the goods and services Canadian households typically buy. If the federal government does not issue an official report on the matter, the rest of us cannot possibly have any clue.

Why might this be? Perhaps only the federal government knows how much carbon dioxide is emitted by burning different fossil fuels? Or how much of these fuels go into the production of different goods and services? Or how much Canadians consume of each good or service? Or how much tax would be levied on each tonne of emissions?

But no, all this information is publicly available. Moreover, there appears to be no shortage of people trained in calculating the resulting price impact — economists, I believe they are called — some of whom are employed outside of the federal government.

The economist Jennifer Winter of the University of Calgary, for example, has estimated these would run from $600-700 (in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec) to $1000-1100 (in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia) per household per year, based on the $50 per tonne tax mandated under the federal plan by 2022. The economists Trevor Tombe, also of the University of Calgary, and Nic Rivers, of the University of Ottawa, have made similar calculations.