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To fill up an average Toyota Camry with a 70-litre fuel tank costs $6 in carbon tax

Under the federal formula at $35 per tonne, the carbon tax costs a lot of money at the gas station, approximately 8.55 cents per litre of gasoline with the GST tacked onto it, and 10.06 cents per litre for diesel with the GST. To fill up an average Toyota Camry with a 70-litre fuel tank costs $6 in carbon tax. A Dodge Ram pick-up truck costs more than $10 in carbon tax and a Ford Super Duty Diesel costs more than $17 per fill up. For tractor-trailer trucks, it costs $45 in carbon taxes to fill up just one of those cylinder tanks with diesel. Canadians bought more than 40 billion litres of gasoline and more than 16 billion litres of diesel fuel in 2016. Multiply that volume by the carbon tax per litre and the government haul is crystal clear.

It gets worse, though, because even with the carbon tax costing Canadians billions of dollars, it’s still not reducing emissions, according to environmentalists leading the carbon-tax charge. In January, the Sierra Club reported on the B.C. experiment: “emissions were higher in 2015 than in 2010 and have risen in four of the last five years. B.C.’s latest emissions data mark years of failure to reduce emissions by more than a token amount.” If taking billions of dollars away from Canadians doesn’t reduce emissions, then, what is the point of this forced carbon tax?

If taking billions of dollars away from Canadians doesn’t reduce emissions, then, what is the point of this forced carbon tax?

When the forced federal carbon tax is set at $50 per tonne in 2022, that means that gasoline will have a carbon tax of 11.63 cents per litre. Will that be enough? Not according to the Environment Canada bureaucrats who told Environment Minister Catherine McKenna that the country needs a carbon tax of $100 per tonne by 2020 and a tax of $300 per tonne by 2050 to meet the government’s promises under the Paris climate agreement. That would be 23 cents per litre on gas in 2020 and then 70 cents per litre by 2050 — about $50 extra in today’s money to fill up the family sedan.