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Does that make the whole thing, as many critics seem to believe, a wash, with little real impact on emissions?

Is the government, as Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister fumed, simply “taking money and giving it back”? Not a bit. The tax, which applies at different rates to different fuels depending on their carbon content, alters the relative prices of things; like all price signals, it encourages consumers to change their behaviour in order to stay within their budget.

Photo by Liam Richards/The Canadian Press/File

The rebates, on the other hand, are lump-sum: everyone gets the same amount, no matter what.

Well, that’s not quite true. People who live in higher-emitting provinces like Saskatchewan will get more than their counterparts in Ontario or New Brunswick. So will people in the country, compared to city folk. So to some extent the plan “forgives” those who consume more.

Still, people in those areas will have the same incentive as others to cut back on their consumption of fossil fuels at the margin. Maybe the extra income might cause people to consume a little more — but not as much as the increase in price causes them to consume less, or to substitute lower-taxed fuels in their place. They still get the full rebate even if they don’t. But they get to keep a lot more of it if they do.

Pallister knows this, which is why His own plan proposed much the same, before it was abruptly canned three weeks ago. The other Conservative opponents also know it — just as they know their preferred alternatives, a mix of regulatory and subsidy schemes much like the ones that have so signally failed to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to date, would cost consumers more than the carbon tax. Only without any offsetting rebates.