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Last week, Trudeau in the House of Commons and McKenna in environment committee hearings, failed to answer another basic question posed by Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and Tory MP Robert Sopuck, respectively.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

That was: How much will Trudeau’s $50 per tonne national carbon price (in 2022) reduce Canada’s emissions?

(Thanks to my former Sun News colleague Brian Lilley for pointing this out on Twitter.)

The Trudeau-McKenna response was to attack the Conservatives under Stephen Harper for doing nothing about climate change during their 10 years in office, failing to mention that the prior Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin did nothing for 13 years before that.

The reason Trudeau and McKenna didn’t say how many megatonnes of emissions the PM’s $50 per tonne national carbon price will reduce Canada’s emissions by — a megatonne or Mt represents a million tonnes of emissions — is that they don’t know.

That’s because imposing a national carbon price in the way Trudeau has done it will only tell the federal and compliant provincial governments how much money it will take from Canadians due to these emissions, not how much emissions will be reduced.

That can only be determined after the fact by trial and error, using the guideline that the higher the carbon price, the more emissions fall.

But even that isn’t reliable if the goods and services to which the carbon price is applied are necessities, such as electricity or home heating fuel, which consumers must buy no matter the cost.