The Canadian Press Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer makes a campaign stop in London, Ont., on Sept. 24, 2019.

OTTAWA — “Under Justin Trudeau, we are falling further behind and I do not understand why he is still going all-in on a carbon tax that has been proven to fail.” — Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer in Thorold, Ont., on Sept. 24. After the Liberals promised to toughen their greenhouse-gas reduction targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer was asked whether he would match the proposal. The Conservatives, he said, would stick to the current target of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, through a proposed plan for the environment that would scrap the current federal carbon-pricing regime. The Liberal plan includes a price on carbon-dioxide emissions of $20 per tonne, which the federal government imposes on New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan because those provinces did not have carbon-pricing systems of their own. It’s to expand to cover Alberta in the new year and the price is to rise to $50 per tonne in 2022. Watch: Trudeau unveils Liberal climate plan

Individuals get rebates through the tax system, meant to equal the average household’s carbon-tax payments. People whose lifestyles produce fewer emissions come out ahead. Economists have long argued that carbon taxes are efficient ways of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over time, because they use a market mechanism to help shift the behaviour of consumers and corporations away from burning fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide without favouring one way of reducing emissions over any other. Given the federal carbon tax only came into effect April 1, a reporter asked Scheer what proof he could provide of its failure. “We can point to British Columbia, which has had a carbon tax for a long period of time and whose emissions went up last year,” said Scheer. The B.C. carbon tax came into effect in 2008 and yes, data released earlier this month show that total greenhouse-gas emissions in the province reached 64.5 million tonnes in 2017, an increase of 1.2 per cent over the year before.

That same data, the Conservatives noted, also showed that total emissions had declined by only about 0.5 per cent since 2007, which is the baseline year the province uses to measure the reductions. Dan Woynillowicz, policy director at Clean Energy Canada, said B.C. has been experiencing growth in population and the economy that has led to an increase in emissions, which he said would have been much greater if the carbon tax had not been in place. The province also did not increase the carbon tax between 2012 and 2017, before the new government of NDP Premier John Horgan committed to increasing it by $5 per tonne annually beginning in April 2018, which Woynillowicz said should help to put reductions back on track. “A good chunk of that was a period of stasis, where policies were not doing what they needed to be doing,” he said. Other research, Woynillowicz said, shows the carbon tax in B.C. has affected behaviour in ways that would reduce emissions. That has included declines in the consumption of gasoline, diesel and residential natural gas, as well as consumers buying more fuel-efficient vehicles. “All of those independent analyses have found that having the carbon tax made a difference,” he said. Watch: Andrew Scheer unveils Conservative climate plan