March 21, 2024 | Victoria News via UVic News
The point of the carbon tax hike is to provide a monetary incentive for Canadians to reduce their carbon emissions. The current federally mandated carbon tax hike will result in about $1.30 extra for drivers each time they fill up a 40-litre gas tank. According to a March 2023 report from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, most Canadians will receive these tax dollars back in rebates.
The B.C. Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation spoke out to Premier David Eby against the tax increase. UVic’s Dr. Felix Pretis has also been a part of the overall discussion with a 2022 study investigating whether the carbon tax reduces CO2 Emissions from the British Columbia point of view. Dr. Pretis asserted in this study that “the introduction of North American’s first major carbon tax has reduced transportation emissions but not ‘yet’ led to large statistically significant reductions in aggregate CO2 emissions … instead, closures and efficiency-improvements in emission-intense industries in untaxed provinces have reduced emissions. Overall, the results show that existing carbon taxes (and prices) are likely too low to be effective in the time frame since their introduction.”
Dr. Pretis is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at UVic and co-director of the Climate Econometrics project. If you are interested in reading more of Dr. Pretis’ work, the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications encourages you to visit the university’s institutional repository UVicSpace, where two of his co-authored publications are available to read without fees or passwords.
