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The lowest-cost solution, then, would be for carbon pricing to replace these costlier, though less visible alternatives. In that sense the Liberal proposal is second-best: provinces can simply layer the price on top of their existing regulatory schemes, as those provinces that already price carbon have done. But the worst, most costly alternative would be to layer regulations on top of regulations, as many opponents are proposing.

The campaign against carbon pricing, then, while it might appear to make certain arguments on the surface, in fact appeals to a number of other unspoken arguments, or rather assumptions: that we can just do nothing; that taxes that aren’t visible aren’t real, and so on. In the same vein, the Conservatives have begun to play on the alleged regressiveness of carbon pricing, invoking the hardship to hockey moms driving their kids to games.

This will be persuasive to you, if you ignore a) that families in most of the country are already paying carbon taxes in one form or another, b) the availability of offsetting transfers, such as the rebates British Columbia provides to low-income families, and c) that the same concern would argue just as well for suppressing every other cost. If the costs of releasing carbon into the atmosphere should not be included in the price, why should the cost of extracting the oil from the ground? Maybe gas should be free.

A more obvious dodge underlies the complaint, heard in certain provincial capitals, that any federal carbon tax would be a “tax grab”

A more obvious dodge underlies the complaint, heard in certain provincial capitals, that any federal carbon tax would be a “tax grab.” That might have some substance to it if the feds were proposing to keep the revenues for themselves. But as the plan is explicitly to return them, in their entirety, to the provinces in which they were collected, it has none. Whether it proves to be a tax grab or not is entirely up to the provinces.

For example, if Brad Wall is concerned that a carbon tax would take, as he calculates, $2.5 billion out of the pockets of Saskatchewanians, he has a very simple remedy open to him: cut taxes by the same amount. As a friendly suggestion, I note the province will collect roughly $2.8 billion in personal income taxes this year. I suspect that many in the province would accept a carbon tax if it meant they never had to pay provincial income tax again.