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This is silly for a number of reasons. First of all, there are already plenty of taxes on fossil fuels. In 2012, gasoline taxes averaged 31% of the pump price. Federal excise taxes and provincial fuel taxes combined generated revenues of $13.7-billion for the 2012-2013 year. This means each Canadian – man, woman, or child – pays an average of almost $400 a year in taxes related to fuel consumption.

As for the production side, the industry that develops oil and gas resources in this country pays on average $18-billion a year in taxes and royalties to different governments across Canada. Hardly chump change.

More fundamentally, deciding what counts as an externality and how much that externality is worth in dollar terms is a tricky business, and it’s most definitely not the same thing as putting a number on fossil-fuel subsidies. It’s true that if Canadians could not move around by car as easily and affordably as they can now, there would be less traffic congestion, and the air in our cities might be less polluted. But if we all reverted to heating our homes with firewood instead of natural gas, air quality would suffer, and our forests would be stressed as well.

As for traffic jams, in addition to their direct costs in terms of productive hours lost, it’s also true that they’re stressful and that stress is a cause of heart disease. Why not include the additional costs to our health care system in our externality calculation?

These many billions of dollars, Anderson claims, could be put to better use. They could finance the building of hundreds of kilometres of light rail, fix our crumbling roads, or provide cheap daycare to millions of children.