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Canadian Carbon Tax Shift?

Posted by Alan Durning

06/19/2008 12:35 PM

Opposition leader proposes nationalizing BC plan, sort of.

Taking a page out of BC's playbook, the Canadian opposition leader is proposing an audacious and well-structured carbon tax shift.

And in a continuation of the scrambling of left and right about tax shifting, the proposal comes from Canada's center-left party as an election platform to distinguish it from the governing center-right party (which immediately critized the proposal).

This dynamic exactly reverses the situation in British Columbia, where the carbon tax shift has come from the center-right governing party and the left party is attacking it in its election campaign. (See, for example, this article.)

(In my view, BC's left party is behaving badly. They're deceiving voters about the effects of the provincial tax shift on working families and rural residents, and they're playing on citizens' fears about taxation. It's disappointing, especially considering that the same party proudly introduced North America's first tax shift ever almost a decade ago, with Sightline's help.)

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Comments

Posted by Milan 06/19/2008 04:02 PM

It will be very interesting to see the details of the plan. Hopefully, some of the NGOs that have performed numerical analyses on previous plans will do the same thing for this one.

Posted by Sungsu 06/19/2008 04:52 PM

The BC NDP party favours a cap-and-trade system. They are not doing a good job in framing the debate and demonstrating why their proposal is better than the BC Liberal's carbon tax.

http://home.bcndp.ca/

Posted by Alan Durning 06/20/2008 12:17 AM

Sung Su,

The BC NDP's support for cap and trade strikes me as pure political cover.

The BC Liberals also support a cap and trade system, in addition to the province's carbon tax shift. They've been negotiating for most of a year with seven western states, Monitoba, and now Quebec on the design of such a system. They seem as serious as any other participant in the negotiations.

My impression is that the BC NDP has simply been reading the polls suggesting that there are certain ridings in northern BC where they might be able to use misperceptions of the carbon tax shift as a ticket to an election win.

I'd like to be proved wrong, because I've generally admired the NDP in the past.