What is "Fair"?
More evidence of the mean-spirited, shriveled souls that hide in the breasts of Conservatives.
Recently I’ve heard some inane mutterings among the political ruling class about ‘fairness’ with regard to the carbon tax. Frankly, I find all of this an exercise in disgusting, partisan games-playing. But short of entering a revolutionary moment that ends with various Conservative premiers with their heads on spikes, I suppose I have to write as if these people are arguing in good faith. For those lucky few who just came back from Mars and don’t know what I’m talking about, the Federal Liberal government decided to give people who heat their homes with oil a three year reprieve from having to pay carbon tax on it—and the Conservatives are screaming bloody murder over it.
The reason Trudeau and co. put forward for this is that a lot of Maritime MPs were saying that their constituents were freaking out because the cost of heating their homes with oil was driving them into the poor house. The idea is that during this three year pause the federal government will help them replace their old, expensive oil furnaces with new air-to-air heat pumps that cost a lot less to run.
The response by both the Conservatives and the NDP was that this was in some sense “unfair” because most of the people using oil for home heating live on the East coast (although there are folks in the rest of the country that do too—5% in Ontario as of 2011). To that end, they supported a bill suggesting that the federal government should remove the carbon tax from all types of home heating that involve CO2—oil, natural gas, propane, coal, our children’s future, human souls, etc.
The leader of the Official Opposition asks “how do you argue with it?”. I’m not sure what he means by this, but the idea that there is a some problem of fairness involved requires a little good faith research, IMHO.
First, let’s look at a price comparison between different types of heating fuels. Here’s a chart that shows the relative costs—both in terms of money and carbon—in the present Nova Scotia marketplace.
As you can see from the above, for the same, average sized home in Nova Scotia, you can get a huge difference in the cost of heating in one year:
Air-to-air heat pump: $1,870
High-efficiency natural gas furnace: $2,034
Pellet stove: $2,298
An old furnace or boiler using oil: $4,825
A low-efficiency propane heater: $5,170
I’ve contrasted high-efficiency heat pumps, gas furnaces, and, pellet stoves in the above list with low-efficiency oil and propane heat because the cost difference is so large that no reasonable person would pull out an inefficient propane or oil appliance and replace it with a more efficient one using the same fuel.
Looking at these numbers, it seems obvious to me that no sensible person with access to enough capital would put off switching from oil or propane to something else. In that case, it just seems to me that these people are stuck in the same situation as someone who is forced to buy a pair of 50 dollar work boots that only last for one year because they can’t come up with the 100 dollars to buy a pair that would last for five. In this sort of situation, the only logical thing for the government to do is stop taking the carbon tax and instead offer help to install a more efficient heat source.
One of the things that Liberal MPs from down East have said is that the cost of heating oil has been ‘volatile’. This struck me as a bit odd, because I can remember from my childhood and young adulthood (when I lived in old, crappy homes with oil heat) that oil was always crazy expensive. So I looked for something that would show that so-called recent volatility.
I can only assume that the people who created this graph wanted to compare seasonal price changes from year to year. The thing to remember is that the average price went up significantly from 2020 to 2021, sorta exploded in 2022, and, has only slightly gone down in 2023—and we’re talking about some price increases in the order of 100% !
Yeah, it’s been volatile. And don’t forget that in a situation where you are getting so badly hammered because you haven’t invested in a better heating technology, the odds are pretty big that you haven’t had a lot of money to put into insulation and new windows, either. That means that not only are you spending a lot per litre of oil, you are probably ripping through a lot of it to avoid freezing—and also wearing long underwear and heavy sweaters too!
So the idea that it’s unfair to help a poor person stuck with an inherently expensive heating system without helping every other person in the country is totally ridiculous! If Poilievre and Singh were serious, they could have have put forward a bill that added propane users to the people heating with oil, come up with a means test to identify the fraction of the population who literally cannot afford to get off these obsolete technologies, and, not only cut the carbon tax but also subsidize a switch to a much better option. (Of course, this would have been a non-starter, because this is such a small fraction of the public that neither party could win an election on this sort of policy plank. This why politicians pander to the middle class and ignore the poor.)
The point that is totally lost in the current carbon tax discussion is that the price on carbon isn’t designed to raise money—it’s supposed to change behaviour. That’s why there is a rebate for carbon use. Recently the CBC posted an article about the Alberta Finance minister, Nate Horner, who suggested that that province should subsidize citizens of that province transitioning from other heating methods to fuel oil in order to get off the carbon tax. (He maintains that he’s serious. Which given the things Danielle Smith has done lately, shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. There are strange things happening in Oilberta.)
As an aside, the reporters added in an interactive feature that allows readers to punch in the numbers from their own personal budget to find out what they will get back from the carbon tax rebates. At risk of being accused of ‘virtue signalling’, here’re the numbers that came from my household.
If this seems a bit low, I need to point out a couple things. I’ve never owned a car in my life, but my significant other brought one into the household when she moved in. We don’t drive a lot. She drives South to visit friends in the US about once a year and beyond that we go shopping in the car about once a month. (If memory serves we used one tank of gas all last winter.) In addition, I spent 25 years gutting and super-insulating my home, installed a very efficient gas boiler heating system, and, changed over almost all the windows to tight, gas-filled, double-pained wonders.
I’m lucky in that I had an OK, unionized job most of my life. Plus, growing up on a farm I learned enough carpentry to be able to do a lot of the work myself. But I also made this work a priority because I saw it as a long-term investment that would pay me dividends over the long haul.
And that’s the sort of thing that the carbon tax is supposed to ‘nudge’ people into doing for themselves. If you really want to ‘axe the tax’, and you can afford it, don’t go on a trip or buy a new car—instead insulate your home and buy a heat pump. And if you can afford to do this, but don’t for ideological reasons, then I don’t want to hear any mean-spirited whining from you about how ‘unfair’ it is if the government uses the carbon tax money it takes from you to help a poor person who is trapped in a run-down draughty house with very expensive, obsolete, inefficient technology.
One last thing. I expect this sort of nonsense from the Conservatives. But why were the NDP supporting this idiocy?