Whenever I hear politicians propose to cut the carbon price, I can’t help but think back to my childhood growing up with divorced parents.

On the rare occasions my dad took me for weekends, he would offer me candy and let me stay up late.

“Why can’t you be more like him?” I’d yell after returning home as my mom made me do my homework, eat vegetables and go to bed on time.

So it is with proponents of Axe the Tax. They offer us candy, when the federal government, like my mom, expects us to live responsibly.

But a politician’s promise that pollution can be free is no more realistic than my childish fantasy that I could live on candy alone.

We are all entangled in an energy system that helps and harms our children. While it enables us to taxi our kids around, and keep them warm, it also poisons the air they breathe, evaporates the water they need to drink and burns the forests in which they play.

To preserve summers without smoke, winters when our kids can ski, water they can drink and forests and wildlife with which they can live in awe.

That’s why we pay for our pollution.

This dude gets it. We need to do so much more, but walking back the carbon tax is a terrible idea.

https://archive.is/kpZQu

  • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    The fact that the tax directly impacts billionaires is one of the reasons attacks on it are so thorougly funded.

    The argument here is that taxes on carbon trickle down to the consumer, but that’s true of any tax you place on businesses and their owners. The costs are always passed on, or so goes the argument.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      Plus, all the money from that particular tax comes right back. But the Liberals took the high road and implemented that quietly, so nobody believes it’s happening.

      • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        and implemented that quietly

        Its well known to anyone who has been doing their taxes (or even just paying attention) since the beginning of the carbon pricing system.

        The conservative lies about it have muddied the waters enough that people who don’t bother to fact check anything actually believe those lies.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          Its well known to anyone who has been doing their taxes (or even just paying attention)

          Which is apparently very much a minority.

    • John_McMurray@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      It does nothing of the sort. You think this tax did one single thing to Jimmy Pattison or Galen Weston?