On Thursday evening, the Conservatives used the legislative tools at their disposal to keep MPs around late into the night to vote on a motion that would see the Liberals release a needlessly secret report that gives up the carbon tax goods.

Back in 2015 bureaucrats at the federal finance department calculated how much a federal carbon tax levy was going to cost.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre recently filed an access to information request to receive the document. But when he got it, the pertinent information was blacked out. The data was redacted.

Poilievre is now challenging this, with the Office of the Information Commissioner investigating whether the Liberals in fact broke access to information laws by failing to disclose the data.

You’d think if they’re such proponents of the carbon tax, then they’d be all gung ho to talk about it and all of its details. The truth though is that carbon tax fans never want to discuss the costs. Because they know how high they are and they know this will turn the people off of them.

This is scandalous. The people have a right to know.

What’s even more scandalous is that MPs would collectively vote to block the release of the document once again. While 71 MPs voted in favour of the motion, 184 voted to block it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on more open government, yet he isn’t even willing to release an internal government report to the people on an important public policy issue we’re all talking about.

Poilievre has labelled this saga “the carbon tax cover up.” That’s exactly what this is – the government doing everything they can to stop us from talking about the costs and hide the information from us.

There are a number of estimates out there from private and academic sources. The lowest of them suggests families will pay around $600 per year on average. It could be more.