Carbon tax is toxic in Canada. Bashing it is like a quarter of the conservative's platform.
There's an interview with the former Minister of Environment who pushed through carbon pricing (https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/11/Catherine-McKenna-Intervi... - note this is a thoroughly left leaning newspaper). She notes that she felt the government's failure to properly communicate/advertise about how carbon pricing works (and the refunds I imagine...) left the field wide open for the conservatives to own the messaging and framing.
It's more that it's a dumb idea in the face of other government regulations making it impossible to substitute (looking at you mostly zoning making walking, biking, and public transit best case being extremely inconvenient vs car and severely limiting accommodation choice to mostly very low density car required single family or a very small supply mostly ancient missing middle options or sky scrapers.) This makes the carbon tax need to be very high to change behavior which has knock on effects in the less easily substitutable stuff we all need like food transport that makes every noticeably poorer even when they are getting reimbursed for most to all of their primary carbon tax payments. It doesn't help that close by competitors don't have this tax and can incentivize various companies to leave for greener pastures.
So it's not that it was improperly communicated, pretty much every Canadian understands what is going on. It's that it's dumb without a myriad of other changes to regulation at various other levels of government that should have been changed first. That the feds went at it alone meant it would inevitably be their downfall (all the other really questionable/borderline criminal things this government has done is bonus material)
Can you explain what you mean by making every[one?] noticeably poorer when they have most to all of their payment reimbursed? (for the median individual it is more like "all to more" since the carbon credit is not capped at one's individual carbon tax payments)
There was also estimates for earlier years than 2030 but I don't have the time to dig them up right now and they are also net negative.
They don't have all their payment reimbursed because they pay carbon tax on all their purchases indirectly via buying goods whose price has inflated due to carbon tax on transport, inputs, etc.
But to clarify the report's indirect costs is not due to (just) indirect costs on buying goods transported by carbon tax, but the report's additional "economic factors" is due to "the loss in employment and investment income".
But I personally find this take in their report unfair because the the alternative of not having the carbon tax isn't really the status quo, because there is an "economic cost" from climate change such as 'the interior of BC being hotter than death valley' and 'the town of Jasper burning down'.
That said, I do see that I'm rationalizing my personal beliefs on this topic, and that is also unfair.
There's a fundamental problem with your line of thinking, in that we are around 1.5% of emissions. We could destroy our country's economy and bring that to zero and we would very marginally delay the climate problem reductions are targeting (it's worse when you realize the people with in demand skills will move and emit carbon elsewhere and the people that are left will do stuff like burn wood and coal to keep their mud huts warm in winter so the effect of bringing current emissions to 0 will be far less as emissions shift to different countries and change form.) So this report actually underestimates the negative cost because it overestimates the benefit of the tax. the only potential path to victory here is for things Canada does shaming other, larger emitting countries into change. When we are attempting to shame them we need to be cognizant of maximizing shame while minimizing harm to ourselves and there is no way an actual large carbon tax does that when there are a bunch of ways to get the same shame effect without actually taxing ourselves without reciprocation from the other emitters (my personal favorite plan is to just set our carbon tax to the output weight world average carbon tax and adjust it every year. Then our diplomats can point out how we would love for all you other emitters to raise our tax by raising your own, but there are likely other decent options as well.)
Further, the major problem with a carbon tax in Canada that nobody is talking about is that the carbon tax has to be huge to cause change because Canada as regulated away all the substitution options so people only change their carbon output when they are made much poorer. In economics this is called inelastic demand. There are a massive number of changes to existing regulation that would increase substitution possibilities and make demand for carbon more elastic, making a lower carbon tax have a larger effect and making these changes harms noone and makes everyone materially better off because they have more options but we are instead choosing to try and have a large carbon tax because the regulatory changes are hard and across multiple levels of government. Here's a non exclusive list of things we could change to make a massive shift in carbon demand over time:
1. Relax zoning to allow more dwellings, more lot coverage, taller structures and more freedom for land owners across most of the cities including removing exclusions for single family only zoning (basically give people the ability to build single family if they want and also build a lot of other options.
2. Increase dedicated bike lane and walking infrastructure so that more people take those much cheaper to provide options that are drastically lower in carbon output.
3. In areas that densify enough to justify it, run more public transit, more frequently to make transit a viable option.
4. Deal with fire in six story and under building in a way that doesn't require a second internal fire escape staircase (this ruins floor plans making it way harder to do family friendly 3 bedroom units).
5. Remove or drastically decrease most minimum setback, parking space, contextual anything limitations and streamline building and development permits to make it easier to get this stuff building even though it is unpopular among a vocal minority of the population that tries to hold it up in committee.
*edit sorry first post was so long ago I forgot I touched on some of this already. I'm leaving it because the above is more detailed*
taking as true your claim about the cost of scrubbing (I have no idea what that costs or what other constraints there might be there)
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
that won't fix transportation, agriculture or residential/commercial leaving you with affecting 48% of the emissions and of that 48% it will not be possible for all of it to scrub (not to mention industry is mobile so can move fairly easily to places that don't carbon tax and don't require scrubbers if push comes to shove, which will drive the electric demand portion of industry to those countries as well) so your actual affectable percent of emission is much lower than 48%.
Your best bet is what I outlined (and it's not exclusive you can try and incentivize scrubbing at the same time) because demand for transport and residential doesn't easily move as longa s the people are there, so if you manage to shift say, 15-20% of transport to biking and walking and give people denser options that maintains usable square footage (i.e. not 400 square foot concrete shit boxes in the sky) and another 10-20% to much more efficient public transit, all of a sudden you've had a massive impact and made people super sensitive to carbon prices because they have viable alternatives to the 30 km a day suburbia car commute to the 2500 square foot single family detached house exposted on all sides to the weather. Instead they can, for example get a 2200 square foot 3 story row house only exposed on the roof and narrow front/back, or similar in a 3 story condo complex with one fire exit internal and one elevator allowing enough square footage to make something similar to the row house something that gets built.
For those of us not already determined to vote conservative, the carbon tax was one of the most compelling reasons to vote liberal. It was a well designed policy, even if many people don't understand it.
Since they're both axing the tax anyway, that's one less differentiator which leaves me thinking maybe I should just choose based on who is more likely to pop the real estate bubble.
31% say they won't vote liberals regardless of carbon tax, 23% say they won't vote liberal because of, or partly because of carbon tax, 38% says their liberal support is carbon pricing agnostic, and 8% says carbon pricing makes liberals more attractive.
There's an interview with the former Minister of Environment who pushed through carbon pricing (https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/02/11/Catherine-McKenna-Intervi... - note this is a thoroughly left leaning newspaper). She notes that she felt the government's failure to properly communicate/advertise about how carbon pricing works (and the refunds I imagine...) left the field wide open for the conservatives to own the messaging and framing.
It is disappointing, but not at all unexpected.