Grapevine

Letter to the Editor: Carbon Tax

In my letter last week concerning the Carbon Tax I wrote that the tax was an ‘incentive’ tax but had an ‘inadvertent’ redistributive effect.  With further research I discover the redistributive effect was not inadvertent at all.  In BC the rebate for citizens is available only to those of lower incomes.  Any married couple without children whose adjusted family income is below $57,288 will receive the full amount designated.  Between $57,288 and $95,088 they would receive a reduced amount.  About $95,088 they would get nothing.  The upper limit of $95,088 rises with children but the calculation remains the same.    

British Columbia, Quebec, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories do not participate in the Federal rebate system as they all match the Federal backstop criteria and so are allowed to administer their own system completely.  It is not at all clear from Federal and Provincial websites if the remaining provinces have income based rebate amounts. As a former librarian I have long had problems with internet searches which substitute speed for accuracy and return hundreds of thousands of useless results; it is a clear example of human beings outperforming ‘AI’ by a huge margin and why we should be wary of discovering our ‘facts’ on the internet—as I did for my earlier article.

Legislated income testing in BC to ensure a redistributive effect accounts for the estimate that 80% of recipients receive more in rebate than they pay in tax and makes eliminating the Carbon Tax all the more disastrous for those citizens.  As all political parties act as if the major group that counts in society is what we called the Middle Class, it is perhaps understandable that programs that actually do something for those falling below the Middle Class are viewed as having little voter traction.  Perhaps that is why ‘axe the tax’ can have a closure effect on Middle Class citizens who don’t want to ask questions about what the tax actually does for others less well off.

Oakley Rankin