Very disappointed to see the federal NDP backing the climate-denying Conservatives in attacking the carbon tax on natural gas heating.
Canada’s carbon tax is (mostly) revenue neutral - if you’ve average heating needs, you break even. So cutting it on heating is a de-facto subsidy on large, inefficient homes.
Revenue neutral carbon taxes won a Nobel prize in economics. Anybody with alternate ideas on fighting climate change: show me your Nobel prize.
But the modern NDP is left-populist. They want simple, brute-force top-down solutions to problems. They’re big believers in “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Any level of indirection in policy solutions is bad.
If unions didn’t exist today, and Liberals proposed them as a solution for protecting workers, NDP would scream “no, we want direct top-down government workplace inspections, don’t you dare charge me union dues!”
When obviously: do both. Both the econ-based bottom-up program and the top-down legislation.
If the Liberals want to reduce the tax on oil, they could make heating fuels a flat rate per BTU (or gigajoule, we’re metric - 1 BTU is 1055 J, so a GJ is about a million BTUs).
Natural gas (CH₄) is 0.0373 GJ/m³. It’s also carbon priced $0.1239/m³ – this amounts to $3.32 per GJ.
Fun coincidence - there’s about as much energy in an L of fuel oil as in an m³ of CH₄ - 0.0383 GJ/L.
Currently, heating oil CTax is $0.17/L. Pricing it per-GJ would reduce the CTax on a litre of heating oil to about the same as an m³ of CH₄ – $0.127/L CTax.
Obviously pricing per GJoule of fossil-fuel would be a de-facto subsidy on less-efficient heating fuels, but it would mean the incentive is not to upgrade from oil to gas, but to upgrade to zero-emissions forms of heating like heat pumps.
And it would be a 25% discount on heating oil CTax, so rural people on heating oil would no longer feel “punished” by the CTax - they’re paying the same per unit of heat.
Of course, this assumes rural grievance is rational.
The carbon tax is the lightest touch, least effort possible for addressing climate change, and to say “yea, but lets cancel it” is just kicking the can down the road for another 5 years.
I heat via natural gas, and pay the carbon tax to do so. I’m ok with that.
The issue is those that cannot make the switch to electric also aren’t in the best spot to pay thr carbon tax. It’s a catch 22 for the poor. Ending the carbon tax for now is a good thing since those that could switched to electric and those that couldn’t won’t be punished.
Ending the carbon tax now would result in them having less money available.
That doesn’t actually help them.
It’s a typical conservative talking point. Take a complex system, make it sound simple, pitch a simple solution (that in reality won’t fix anything and actually usually makes thing worse), people who don’t understand the complex system latch onto the simple solution, then when the simple solution is implemented it doesn’t fix anything but no one questions why.
We see his with conservatives time and time and time again, it’s sooo frustrating. I wish the economy was as simple as they claim it is.
How would ending the carbon tax end up with then having less money. A tax directly affecting them ending would give them more money to work into their budget. This is a simple cause and effect. The only people with less money is the government, which lets be honest the carbon tax on heating homes was never a large portion of their budget.
The carbon tax isn’t a traditional tax, the money collected is pooled and paid back out evenly to households.
This means as long as a household is producing less carbon than the average, they get more money back from the rebate then they paid into it.
High income people still currently produce significantly more carbon than poorer households. The last time I looked at the numbers, something like 60% of households got more money back from the program, and nearly all poorer households fall into that.
Yes there are likely outlier poorer households who also produce way more carbon, but when looking at the system overall they are the exception and could likely fix their situation by changing their behaviour.
To reiterate, this is not a tax because the income doesn’t go into the governments income, reducing the income tax has no impact on government revenue. The majority of poorer households get more money back from the carbon rebate system.
Maybe so. But once again this isn’t actually a tax. Conservatives can call it a tax, and it’s clearly working to confuse people and muddy the water. But it’s isn’t a tax, so cleaning up the tax code is a completely different problem
Trudeau said the Liberals are increasing the maximum amount of funding towards the purchase and installation of a heat pump from $10,000 to $15,000. They will be doing this by adding up to $5,000 in “grant funding to match provincial and territorial contributions,” which, according to a PMO release, would mean most households will be able to get their pump for free.
While not representing a majority of Canadians, there are people living in regions that get regularly cold enough for heat pumps to be inadequate. Which means running a standard electric furnace (expensive and inefficient) during the coldest months of the year. Which… is not ideal, especially for lower-income rural persons. (IE, most people living in these regions of Canada.)
The rebate is great, but there are persons for whom it is insufficient.
Do I think that’s a good reason to remove the carbon tax from heating fuels? No, not really. (Assuming I understand how the tax works, it really isn’t the burden people expect it to be. (You can debate about inefficiencies, but as far as manipulating economics to incentivize transfer away from fossil fuels without harming the general public, it’s reasonably sound.)) But people do have legitimate concerns that shouldn’t be trivially dismissed.
Rural and remote residents already get a slightly larger rebate, and as a city dweller, I think their share should be higher for exactly the reason you state. Also, keep in mind that at night time, which will typically be the only time people end up using resistive heat while on a heat pump, electricity is cheaper. Ontario’s ultra-low off-peak option is even more extreme. It’s probably cheaper to run resistive heat at night, than running the heat pump during peak times.
Saskatchewan does not have “off-peak” electricity pricing because Saskatchewan runs our power grid on old Coal plants. So not only does it get cold enough for heat pumps to not be sufficient here (even during the day sometimes), our electricity is not a green option either. Natural gas heating makes more sense here in Saskatchewan and it pains me to say that. Until such time as we get a green grid (get rid of the coal), natural gas heating is the best option for us.
Edit to add: I will gladly continue to pay the carbon tax because of 2 things: 1. I get more back on the rebate than I spend (my provincial premier is full of it) and 2. If some of that money from the tax goes to green initiatives, then I gladly support that.
Comparing the federal energy mix for Saskatchewan in 2019, to SaskPower’s claims for 2023, we’re going in the right direction with respect to coal. I don’t expect Moe’s SaskParty to do much better than that, unfortunately. Hopefully nuclear and wind take off more, or we’re more willing to import hydro from Manitoba, even at a higher cost.
Though reading that closer, SaskPower’s claims for hydro include imports (it’s unspecified from where, but the only place that makes sense is Manitoba), while the federal paper is only generating capacity, no imports. I wonder what the mix including imports was in 2019.
That is a true statistic, yes. Without a ton of relevance to the discussion at hand unfortunately. Most of Scandinavia is coastal, and while cold compared to the rest of Europe, has quite mild winters compared to the northern Canadian interior. Additionally, popular in this context is about a 50% adoption rate by household, without much information (that I can find, at least) on distrobution; I suspect most of those are in southern and costal areas, and the (less populated) northern interior primarily relies on other heating methods.
You’ll find most of Canada isn’t in the interior Northern regions. Considering heat pumps still have furnaces attached, I think it’s fine to force everyone to have them
The rebate is great, but there are persons for whom it is insufficient.
The whole principle of the rebate is that the average person within a province breaks even. So people in Saskatchewan are only competing with other Saskatchewaneans, not with Vancouverites.
And if you’re polluting far more than the average person in your province, such that the rebate is grossly insufficient, even after figuring in the rural boost to the rebate?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think perhaps you misread what I said (or I communicated poorly). I’m speaking about the funding incentive to purchase a heat pump. The carbon tax rebates, as you say, are designed to break even by or better for the majority of the population; I’ve got no issues with that. I was responding to the implication that a transition to electricity was trivial because households could purchase a heat pump for little to no cost. There are households for which the energy costs of resistive heating+heat pump are likely higher than their current heating costs, making this not the case. (Unless there are further rebates I don’t know about for people who have a heat pump, beyond covering initial costs?)
Even a high SEER heat pump would need a gas furnace to supplement winter heating on the prairies. They get very inefficient below about -15C. A shallow geothermal would work but most people don’t have the land to do that, and they’re vastly more expensive to install with several hundred feet of loop installed below the frost line.
Anyone that thinks a heat pump is an option outside of a few small areas of Canada needs to do more research.
Exactly, you can throw all the incentives you want at me and I’d be happy to switch today, but my landlords don’t care because they’re not the ones paying the carbon tax.
My EV gets about 15kwh/100km average over the whole year (including heating)
That works out to around $2.25 per 100km vs $14.80 for your vehicle at current prices in BC.
That’s a savings of over $12k per 100,000 km.
The difference between the gas and EV version of my vehicle was $25k, so anything over 200,000km is saving me money compared to having purchased a gas car. If gas prices go up over the next 10 years, I will save even more.
That being said, you probably shouldn’t get rid of a functional gas vehicle until it doesn’t work any more or becomes prohibitive to maintain.
If they sold an EV compact pickup I would get one tomorrow but the Lightning is a joke, it’s a minivan with an uncovered trunk. And with a 25km commute it’s gonna take a long time for EV savings to catch up with a $10k truck :/
Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.
And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it’s frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is “free” and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.
Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.
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