‘Carbon tax didn’t work’

Dear Editor:

An open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Your carbon tax is not working!

A recent report from the Department of the Environment in their National Inventory Report, identified that the British Columbia carbon tax, implemented in 2008, did not succeed in cutting emissions and in fact increased green house emissions by 65.6 million tonnes between 2015 and 2018. In 2018 alone emissions grew by 15 million tonnes.

This tax was praised by your government and used as the model for the National Gas Pollution Pricing Act of 2018. You were advised by many experts, real not political, that such a tax on Canadians would be futile because most of us Canadians have no option but to heat our homes with natural gas or with electricity derived from gas or coal burning generating stations. We in Ontario are fortunate to be able to use the majority of our electricity from nuclear power, but not so in all the other provinces, apart from New Brunswick.

Getting to work also requires that most of us have to drive a gasoline powered vehicle. I know there are electric cars and soon there will be electric buses around, but these vehicles are not available to most Canadians and if they were they still need to be charged using electricity from the sources discussed above.

I am sending this note to the leaders of the other parties also because I know you are not alone in believing what Catherine McKenna stated in 2018 on your behalf, “We can have a direct price on pollution like BC does. Pricing pollution works.” Guess she and you were wrong!

So what is the way ahead for Canada? Obviously we have to reduce emissions that impact the environment. How do we do that? I am not an expert, but as an engineer I do have some understanding of science so here are few ideas.

Tighten emission regulations and penalties for all industrial emitters of greenhouse gases. Reward success with tax credits.

Embrace/fund/support the work currently being carried out by Chalk River National Laboratories on small modular nuclear reactors.  Develop commercial operations and sell these reactors to India, China and the U.S. That would certainly make a difference to the planet’s main airborne pollution sources.

Help provinces like Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta to close down coal fired generating stations and build natural gas powered ones – or even better, nuclear.

Embrace/fund/support companies working on the use of hydrogen cells for transport prime movers, but be aware that this is a useless thing to do if you are going to produce the hydrogen using natural gas in the first place.

Apparently between 2014 and 2019 the federal government invested $60 billion to drive down greenhouse gas emissions, generate clean technologies, etc.  As a taxpayer seeing greenhouse gas emissions still increasing do you think I consider this enormous amount of money to have been well spent?

You have got a throne speech coming up, and I know you will be spending lots of my money on a range of things.  Can I ask that when it comes to the environment, would you please identify that the carbon tax didn’t work and you have some other ideas?

Michael Lee,
Salem