There is a sculpture on McGill College Avenue in Montreal called the Illuminated Crowd.
It was created in 1985 by Franco-British artist Raymond Mason, and depicts a crowd of 65 people of all ages, races, shapes and sizes.
In the front of the crowd, the people look happy as a man standing front-row centre points confidently off into the distance, but behind them the mood gradually darkens as people descend into fear, strife, terror and death.
Part of the plaque at the base of the sculpture reads: “A crowd has gathered, facing the light, an illumination brought about by fire, an event, an ideology — or an ideal.”
The sculpture illustrates how the leaders of the world can become so obsessed with carrying out their ideas, that they ignore the pain and suffering these ideas unleash on the rest of us.
In the past, those ideas have included Stalinism, fascism and New Coke.
In its current iteration, the idea could be the federal Liberal government’s insistence that the provinces and territories put a price on carbon. The folks in the front row could be well-meaning politicians dreaming of a cleaner environment and a carbon neutral future. And if the territorial government decides to follow the federal government's pricing scheme for carbon, the NWT's residents will be the ones writhing and dying in the back of the crowd.
That's an exaggeration, of course, but it would certainly be a realistic response from residents of the NWT to pack up their belongings and flee should a carbon tax be imposed -- which in the North, would essentially amount to a tax on everything -- without some corresponding relief on the already exorbitantly high cost of living we Northerners must endure.
The territorial government agreed to the federal proposal for a national carbon tax after signing the government's Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change in 2016.
Starting this year, the federal government could charge residents $10 per tonne for greenhouse gas emissions, which would increase by $10 per tonne each year until it reaches $50 per tonne in 2022, says a discussion paper released by the GNWT in July.
The average household would pay $923 a year in carbon tax by 2022, if the territory follows the federal pricing model, it says.
Sure, the territorial government could reduce the taxes’ the impact by returning most of the funds to the economy through fuel rebates or tax credits but it would not be possible to create a perfectly revenue neutral system, says the paper.
Furthermore, remote communities, completely dependent on fuel for their survival, would be disproportionately affected by the carbon tax, as would lower income households, it continues.
This means there would be an increase in the cost of living no matter how good of a scheme the government comes up with. And the cost of living is already much too high.
Here, in Yellowknife tenants already pay the highest rent in Canada, according to data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Commission, and over the last few years the city has raised the fees for everything from utilities to recreation fees. If prices go much higher, people will flee.
The problem is compounded because while the carbon tax could increase the cost of living, so too will climate change.
Shorter winter road seasons due to later freeze-ups and earlier break-ups mean higher transportation and food costs, thawing permafrost will damage infrastructure and drier forests mean more fires. All of this will cost money in a territory that doesn't have enough money as it is to pay for infrastructure southern Canada already has.
Here in the North, we know about climate change. It is already putting stress on plants, animals and people that have become finely adapted to living in a cold climate.
But scientists project temperatures will continue to warm, regardless of global efforts to reduce emissions.
So unless the government wants to make the territory unlivable for everyone but the highly-paid, it should design a system that moves us away from fossil fuel dependency without raising the cost of living.