- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Thunder Bay—Rainy River
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $144,359.62
- Government Page
- Nov/2/23 1:44:30 p.m.
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We all remember, in the spring, when the smoke was so thick in Ottawa that we could not see more than a couple of blocks away. In other areas, flooding is a problem. Flooding has been a problem in B.C. West of my riding, we had record flooding at the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake areas last year. The list goes on. The polar ice caps are melting. Permafrost is melting. Island states in the South Pacific risk disappearing forever because of rising sea levels.
What is the Conservative Party's reply to all this? It wants to get rid of one of the government's best and most effective tools for dealing with climate change. I do not know about the opposition, but I feel a sense of duty to future generations, to my kids.
I have tons of kids. One of them is Miko. Miko is only three years old. Miko has done absolutely nothing to contribute to climate change, yet he and his generation are the ones who are going to be asked to pay the price of climate change, rather than our generation or the generation before, if we do things like axing the carbon tax.
What do the Conservatives want to do? They seem to want to do basically whatever it is going to take in order to get them elected the next time around. The Conservatives, in their 2021 convention, did not even want to agree to a statement saying they believed climate change existed.
I do not like the tax. Nobody likes taxes. However, the reality is most people get the tax back in terms of the rebate, and it does motivate people to change over to green sources of energy. Most Canadians do believe in climate change and want to do what is best for their kids and for future generations.
I, like most Canadians, perhaps begrudgingly, believe the carbon tax is absolutely the right thing to do. Therefore, I disagree with this motion.
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- Nov/2/23 1:36:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the CPC motion is to drop the carbon tax not only on oil temporarily but also on all heating fuels temporarily.
Believe it or not, I actually have friends in the Conservative Party, who I think like me through my sometimes philandering political ways. My friends in the Conservative Party may be surprised to hear I actually approve of the carbon tax, and I am in favour of the announced Maritime exemptions.
The Leader of the Opposition took the rather unusual step of appearing on Thunder Bay TV a few days ago in order to tell the people of Thunder Bay that the members of Parliament for Thunder Bay are basically useless because we did not get the same kind of exemption for natural gas and propane as the people in the Maritimes got for oil. Now, people all across Canada get the exemption for oil.
In response to what the Leader of the Opposition had to say to this motion, let me start off by saying, and I think this is really important, most people know that 80% of people actually get back as much as, or more than, they pay in carbon tax. In addition, people in rural areas get 10% on top of that. Now, because of this announcement, that will be going up to 20%, including in northern Ontario. That is certainly justified because people in rural areas are often dependent on fossil fuels. They have further to commute, and they cannot resort to using mass transit. I am in favour of all those things.
Why is the present plan withholding carbon tax on only oil and not on other fuels? There are good reasons for that, and I am going to talk about four reasons.
First, the cost of heating one's house with oil is more expensive than with other fuels, particularly in the Maritimes. I want to mention some figures from a recent CBC report on the subject. Home heating oil in P.E.I., with the carbon tax, costs $47.87 per gigajoule of heat energy. Propane in Ontario costs $39.33 with the carbon tax. Natural gas in Saskatchewan is $12.09.
To reiterate, that is a total of $48 for oil and down to $43 if we do not include the carbon tax, which we are removing. Propane is around $39, and natural gas is around $12. The bottom line is that people who heat with oil have to pay a lot more to heat their homes than people who heat with other fuels.
Second, there are other differences with oil. One is the fact that oil produces more greenhouse gases than other fuels. The best is natural gas, and the second best is propane. In terms of low-hanging fruit, the best bang for one's buck is to get people off oil and into a green transition.
Third, because the carbon tax is based on tonnes of CO2 produced, and oil produces the most CO2, the amount of carbon tax paid on oil is higher than on the other fuels.
Lastly, and this is an important one, when a lot of older homes were built, they had oil furnaces in them. As I grew up in Kaministiquia, outside of Thunder Bay, we had an oil furnace.
In the years since the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of people have transitioned to cheaper forms of fuel. The people who have not are often the people who could not afford to transition, and that leaves us in the ironic situation that the people who are least able to afford the fuel will have to pay the most. Both my party and I are not unsympathetic to such people, and that is why we are dropping the carbon tax for a limited period of time for those people.
In terms of a long-term solution for people on oil, certainly heat pumps are part of the solution. As oil is dirtier, getting those people to transition to green sources of heating is certainly something that is desirable from an environmental perspective. We already have a program that offers $10,000 for low- and middle-income families in order to buy heat pumps.
In addition to that, and this is the one difference in what people in the Maritimes are getting that we are not getting in Ontario, they are also getting an additional $10,000, which is $5,000 from the province and $5,000 from the federal government, if they want to put in a heat pump. That is because those provinces agreed to do it. If Ontario wanted to do it, I am told we, too, in Ontario could.
I think this is important: The Conservative Party is not just suggesting a temporary pause on the carbon tax on heating fuels. It wants to get rid of the carbon tax altogether. It wants to axe the tax. Frankly, I do not agree with that, and I find it a little difficult to believe. Why does it want to get rid of the carbon tax when, in fact, a lot of Conservative economists actually think the carbon tax is one of the most efficient ways, if not the most efficient way, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Furthermore, a lot of Conservative economists like it because it is a market-based intervention rather than a regulatory intervention. Some of the many, perhaps they are not Conservative, but they are not really left-leaning, institutions that approve of carbon tax and carbon pricing include the American Enterprise Institute, a centre-right American think tank.
In 2009, in response to the question, “[What is] the better approach to climate change?” Its answer was, “A direct tax placed on emissions of greenhouse gases. The tax would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases.”
Of note, in 2023, like some other Conservatives, it seems to have changed its position.
Some other groups, again, not exactly left-leaning institutions, that support carbon tax are the World Bank in 2023, the Business Council of Canada in 2019 and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce in 2021. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in a 2018 endorsement, said, “Carbon pricing is probably the most effective mechanism of emissions reduction.”
Subsequent to this, it emphasized that the carbon tax should be flexible and competitive. Certainly with this, we are seeing some flexibility.
Even the Conservative Party, in the last election, ran on a platform that included a carbon tax. I know that members of the Conservative Party deeply believe in their convictions, but it appears that when the political winds blow another way, their convictions seem to blow away, too, and they have to come up with new convictions. Now, they actually oppose it.
I am somewhat shocked by the Conservative opposition to the carbon tax, particularly given what would seem to be the almost daily climate-related calamities we hear about, both in Canada and around the world. For example, a heat dome in B.C. recently killed over 600 people, mostly elderly people. Wildfires burned down the town of Lytton, B.C. and forced the evacuation of people in Alberta, Northwest Territories and—
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