Last week, we featured an interview with deputy premier Caroline Wawzonek where she said the GNWT doesn’t have to wait until the legislature officially meets on Feb. 6 to change the regulations that collect carbon tax on home heating fuel.
Instead, she said the issue could be decided by cabinet to make the regulatory changes. She then concludes the interview by repeating our new premier’s line that it’s unfair that Northerners should be expected to pay the same tax the rest of Canadians are expected to pay, as if having a two-tiered system would somehow provide a better solution.
So this begs the question — if making the change is so easy, why hasn’t it happened yet? As of this writing, Jan. 23, the tax on home heating fuel remains in effect.
Premier R.J. Simpson blamed the carbon tax for much of the North’s woes in his interview with NNSL on Dec. 19 — over a month ago. If it is as easy as a cabinet meeting, there is no reason why cabinet couldn’t have made the change after being sworn in.
Saying the GNWT had to take Christmas off is no excuse; the territory’s search and rescue apparatus had to be activated the day after Boxing day when an Air Tindi flight went down in a blizzard. So it’s not as if staff couldn’t have spent the couple hours needed over the holiday to move an order in council into effect to save people of the North the hardship of high heating bills. During the climate change-caused wildfire evacuations — which probably cost Northerners a lot more than the carbon tax does — the legislature was able to meet remotely to delay the territorial election, so why couldn’t cabinet meet remotely before or even during the holiday break?
Considering the level of political grandstanding around carbon pricing — former Nunakput MLA Jackie Jacobson went on a big tour of Yellowknife with Conservative party Northern Affairs critic Bob Zimmer earlier in the year to tell Northerners how victimized they were by the tax — you would think getting it removed before the expenses of the holiday season began to mount would have been a priority. But here we are, several months after the Liberals announced the exception to save their Atlantic MPs’ hides, still paying the GNWT to heat our homes.
It may interest Northerners to know a recent paper published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy by University of Calgary economics professors Dr. Trevor Tombe and Dr. Jennifer Winter pretty much snuffed out the argument that carbon taxes are driving high prices or inflation. According to their calculations, carbon taxes have increased prices a whole 0.6 per cent since 2015. The real culprits, they point out using annual economic data from Statistics Canada, were a jump in the cost of traditional energy sources, such as oil, natural gas and coal. The tax has also had a minimal “trickle down” effect on prices as well, as the federal government provides protections to large emitters.
Here in the NWT, complaining about the carbon tax is absorbing so much attention that we’re not asking tough questions elsewhere, such as what happens if Norman Wells or Fort Good Hope have to be evacuated in a hurry, what is the GNWT doing about Hay River’s near-annual flooding or what will the people of Tuktoyaktuk do when their hamlet has washed away? If another evacuation proves necessary, can the GNWT afford it? The carbon tax serves as an excellent distraction for politicians who need to answer these questions.
What’s happened here is politicians have gotten people worked up and are now dragging their feet to give the people what they’ve been sold. If the carbon tax is as bad as everyone in the last territorial election campaigned on, it would be gone already.