It was good to see this week that someone in the media is finally doing their homework and debunking much of the federal Conservatives’ carbon tax posturing. Just in time to throw shade on Poilievre’s boast that he will “win the carbon tax election” and “axe the tax” comes a news report highlighting how getting rid of the tax and the rebates that come with it will leave many households worse off. 

I wrote about this back in  June and now the CBC’s Robson Fletcher, with help from the University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe has come out with some additional  analysis to further establish the case. As a headline on the CBC story puts it: “High-income households would tend to be the biggest winners, lower-income households hurt the most.”   

According to the CBC report, Tombe used specialized software developed by Statistics Canada to analyze data on things like income, taxation and spending from Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Those four provinces have been subject to the federal carbon levy and rebate system since its inception.  Tombe concluded that getting rid of the program “would harm a much larger fraction of lower- and middle-income households.”

The explanation for that is simple. The more you spend – either directly on fossil fuels or indirectly through carbon tax costs that businesses pass on through their products – the more tax you pay. And people with higher incomes generally spend more money. But because the size of the rebate is unaffected by income or expenditure, lower-income and lower-spending households will come out ahead.

By Trevor Tombe’s reckoning, 94 per cent of households with incomes below $50,000 would receive rebates exceeding their direct and indirect carbon tax costs. About 45 per cent of households with incomes above $250,000 would pay more in tax than they get back in rebates, with five per cent of those absorbing a net loss of $100 a month. Those high-income households would gain the most if the Conservatives eliminate the tax. 

Tombe’s analysis essentially supports what the Liberal government has been saying all along – that 80 per cent of households will get back more in rebates than they pay out through the carbon levy. The Liberals have not been very successful in selling that message. Maybe they would have more luck with a slogan saying something like ‘axing the tax will hurt the poor and help the rich’ (not to mention the oil companies). 

There’s another problem

However, countering the anti-tax mantra will also involve tackling some confusing analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office that the Conservatives have been using to claim that the “the carbon tax will cost most households more than they will ever get back.” As I reported before:

…the PBO added another consideration that has muddied the waters and given carbon tax opponents grounds to attack Liberal claims that most people will be better off. That additional factor is the estimated overall economic impact of the tax, especially on the fossil fuel business. When lower employment and profits from fossil fuel production are taken into account the PBO projects (through some econometric alchemy) that by 2030 the carbon tax may cost the average Nova Scotia household $1,513 a year. In Alberta, where the economic impact would be greatest, households are projected to be down an average of $2,773 from where they would be if there were no carbon tax. 

As Trevor Tombe points out the PBO assessed the economic impact of the tax against a hypothetical scenario in which there is no carbon tax and no form of national climate policy, a possibility he considers unlikely.

“If we were to think about eliminating the carbon tax today, we shouldn’t be thinking about replacing it with nothing,” he says.”We still have targets around lowering emissions, targets that all parties at least rhetorically support … and so if we’re going to be achieving the same target but with tools other than carbon pricing, which is generally the most efficient way to incentivize emissions reductions by individuals and businesses, then we’ll be replacing that system with something that has greater economic costs.”

Rhetorical support aside, it may be a stretch to assume that the Conservatives have a plan to replace the carbon tax with a new national climate policy – it would be more like them to leave policy to the provinces and the oil industry. However, now that Poilievre has announced the  carbon tax election campaign it would be important to ask what comes after the axing of the tax. The CBC report goes some distance in exposing the mendacity of the Conservative position. Is it too much to hope that others will follow and bring an end to the free ride the media have been giving Poilievre on this issue? 

Electric vehicles

In August, in my report on Nova Scotia’s latest climate plan  I took a stab at estimating the number of electric vehicles (EVs) registered in Nova Scotia in 2022. It was necessary to estimate from a couple of different sources because, for what Statistics Canada describes as “contractual limitations of the existing data sharing agreement,” StatsCan data on Nova Scotia vehicle registration is slow to be reported. Thus, to get a handle on how many more EVs were registered in Nova Scotia in 2022 than the 631 reported for 2021 a number of sources came into play.  

An appendix to the government’s climate plan “Urgent times, Urgent Action” claims that three per cent of vehicles sold in 2022-23 were EVs (that would be about 1,200 vehicles), and there are “currently over 3,200 EVs in Nova Scotia.” Other sources provided smaller numbers. Nova Scotia Power estimated there  were about 1,900 EVs as of Jan. 1 2022. And a link to Electric Vehicle Registration Data posted last February through the province’s open data portal showed a pie chart with only 904 registered vehicles.

Well, the StatsCanada numbers for 2022 were recently released  and it appears that the information from the open data portal comes closest to telling the story. According to StatsCanada, there were only 1,278 EVs among the 646,500 Light Duty Vehicles (LDV weighing less than 4,535 kilograms) registered in Nova Scotia in 2022, almost 2,000 fewer than the government’s estimate. 

That modest number does represent a year-over-year doubling of EV registrations, a growth rate which may sound impressive but still leaves Nova Scotia – with about one EV for every 5,000 registered LDVs – well below the national rate, as the Table shows.

EVs as % of registered LDVs 2022, Canada and selected provinces


Registered EVs% of registrations
Canada224,1750.929%
Nova Scotia1,2780.198%
Nfld&Lab3640.101%
PEI4940.470%
NB9330.169%
B.C.68,7332.082%

Source: Statistics Canada Table 23-10-0308-01

Boosting the number of electric cars is not an end in itself – it’s a means for reducing the number of fossil fuel burning cars on the road. On that score, the overall LDV registration numbers for Nova Scotia are underwhelming. According to Statistics Canada, Nova Scotia was one of only three provinces to show an increase in gasoline- and diesel- fuelled registrations in 2022. 

On the other hand, led by Ontario with 85,908 fewer gas and diesel cars and Alberta, with a reduction of 43,892, there were 142,328 fewer registered gas and diesel vehicles in Canada in 2022. By contrast, in Nova Scotia there were 13,836 more registered gas guzzlers in 2022 than there were the previous year, versus an increase of only 2,678 for EVs, hybrids and plug-in hybrids. 

The StatsCanada data don’t show what type of vehicle uses each fuel type, but it is logical  to assume that most of the newly-registered fossil-fuelled vehicles in Nova Scotia will require a lot of gasoline and diesel in order to move about. The reason for that is the 17,841 jump in registered SUVs and crossovers and an increase of 1,735 in pickup trucks. Meanwhile there were 2,755 fewer passenger cars registered in 2022. One could surmise sadly that any reduction in transportation emissions brought about by the modest increase in EVs and hybrids would be offset by the much greater increase in SUVs and pickups. 

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