I was saddened to see what was clearly a politically motivated column in the April 10 edition of the North Island Gazette, ‘Cutting taxes comes with a cost’.
The article makes light of the ‘small’ carbon tax increase. Sure it was small, in the same way a pot of water is heated to boiling slowly.
We now pay 17.61 (9 per cent of the cost of gasoline at the time of this writing) cents carbon tax on a litre of gas.
This is on top of excise tax, provincial tax, PST, GST.
The government is taking a tidy sum of profit on the sale of every litre of gas.
And the carbon tax is scheduled to more than double. And a second ‘clean fuel tax’ is scheduled to be added!
My lived experience, as a North Islander, that depends on propane on my off grid living situation and significant travel to provide my services to my Port McNeill community, is that the direct cost of just the obvious costs of the carbon tax is several thousand dollars.
In fact, I estimate that 1.2 per cent of my fees may represent direct carbon costs in my service based business in Port McNeill.
That 1.2 per cent is my contribution to inflation because of government carbon taxation. I doubt my story is unique among business owners.
This does not take into account the indirect cost of the carbon tax we see in the new Carbon tax bureaucracy, our food, construction, essentially every aspect of our life.
The anonymous Black Press writer gaslights Canadians, “if the latest carbon tax increase of three cents a litre adds hardships, the issue is one of income levels and wages…’ I would argue the cash strapped middle class (effectively none who receive rebates-limited to those earning less than $41,000/year in BC, can access very few wage based government programs, are strapped by government mandated mortgage ‘stress test’, are faced with spiralling housing and food costs) have already been squeezed by the other 14.3 cents of carbon tax!
The escalating costs of everything is the feature of the tax!
It is designed (just like escalating taxes on cigarettes) to drive us away from carbon use to other forms of energy.
Unfortunately those other forms of energy are neither cheap, or necessarily available in our economy.
Our anonymous author goes on with a typical progressive scare, ‘where are taxes going to come from to pay for our services’; ignoring the ridiculous claim the carbon tax was to be income neutral and should not be providing funding for government services/prorams; he should ask a young middle-class family, unable to find a medical doctor, how they feel about being locked into rental payments higher than a mortgage (that they will never qualify for), pinching pennies to feed their children, a life with no holidays and used car ownership that they will be forced to pay repairs to keep running forever since affordable gas powered cars are to be outlawed, feel about loosing access to government programs (few they would actually qualify for anyway) versus the crippling taxes they now pay.
That is ignoring the entire discussion of the questionable carbon reducing benefits of a carbon tax.
That’s another letter to the editor…
Martin Barker,
Port McNeill