The Ontario Chamber of Commerce should have gone further when it urged Premier Kathleen Wynne to delay her cap-and-trade carbon pricing scheme by a year, until Jan. 1, 2018.

It should have called on Wynne to scrap it, and replace it with a carbon tax that is 100% revenue neutral to the public.

Wynne’s plan — based on a flawed European model which has failed to lower industrial greenhouse gas emissions linked to man-made climate change effectively or efficiently, while raising consumer prices and driving millions into energy poverty — isn’t going to work no matter when the Liberals bring it in.

Delaying something that’s broken

doesn’t fix it.

Europe’s decade old cap-and-trade plan known as the Emissions Trading Scheme is overrun by fraud and organized crime.

It will create a massive new government bureaucracy to “cap” emissions and conduct auctions of carbon credits paid for by industries, which will then pass those costs along to the public in the form of higher prices.

It’s the worst form of carbon pricing and the Liberals are introducing it in the worst way.

That is, as a cash grab for the government instead of making it revenue neutral — meaning the government would lower other taxes by $1.9 billion annually to offset the $1.9 billion cap-and-trade is expected to swell government coffers by in its first year alone.

Revenue neutrality provides people with a financial incentive to reduce their purchases of carbon-intensive goods and services while helping them cope with the higher cost of living carbon pricing brings.

Since governments know how to impose taxes and collect them, a carbon tax is cheaper and easier to administer.

The Liberals recently announced a one-year delay in their misguided Ontario Retirement Pension Plan until 2018.

That, like cap-and-trade, is a disaster waiting to happen that will pull billions of dollars more annually out of the pockets of workers and employers, through a new payroll tax.

Wynne’s logic that the best way to grow our economy is to take billions of dollars more out the hands of the public and hand it over to the government doesn’t make any sense.

Then again, when has that ever stopped the Liberals before?