Ontario to require referendum on any future ‘carbon tax’ plan

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he will introduce legislation next week that would require a referendum before any future provincial government brought in a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that are causing global climate change.

The Premier and his Finance Minister, Peter Bethlenfalvy, were at a gas station in Mississauga on Tuesday to announce the pledge – and Mr. Ford launched a fresh attack on newly elected Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, suggesting she would bring in her own carbon tax if her party won power.

“If you look up when she was an MP in Ottawa, she was the queen of the carbon tax,” Mr. Ford said, alluding to Ms. Crombie’s term as an opposition Liberal MP from 2008 to 2011. “She was up there cheering the carbon tax. It makes things more unaffordable for people.”

Ontario’s next election is not until 2026. And Ms. Crombie’s party, with only nine seats in the legislature, trails Mr. Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in published opinion polls. But Mr. Ford often makes public comments about Ms. Crombie, the former mayor of Mississauga, and his PC Party has run TV attack ads targeting her.

In an e-mailed statement, Ms. Crombie did not say whether she would consider an Ontario-made carbon pricing system and accused Mr. Ford of trying to change the channel away from recent missteps.

“Desperate Doug is yet again trying to distract Ontario citizens from his failures, flip flops and scandals,” Ms. Crombie said.

When he was first elected in 2018, Mr. Ford cancelled Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, established by the province’s previous Liberal government. That triggered the imposition of the federal government’s carbon-pricing system to help reduce greenhouse gases.

The Premier has since regularly railed against the resulting federal carbon price, unsuccessfully challenging it in court along with Alberta and Saskatchewan and requiring anti-carbon-tax stickers on gas pumps that were later ruled unconstitutional.

Ontario already has a law on the books that requires referendums before creating or increasing taxes, passed by the PC government of Mike Harris in 1999. Subsequent PC and Liberal governments have simply passed amendments to carve out exceptions in the law when making tax hikes, although Mr. Ford’s has not done so. The existing law does not apply to non-tax measures, such as a cap-and-trade system that allows companies to buy and sell emissions credits.

Alberta passed a law last year requiring a referendum before any hike to personal or corporate income taxes.

The federal carbon pricing system imposes rising levies on fuel and costs for large polluters and is meant to spur conservation and the adaptation of new green technologies. Unlike with conventional taxes, Ottawa provides taxpayers with rebate cheques. According to the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, the system returns more than it costs for about 80 per cent of households in most provinces.

Mr. Ford on Tuesday blamed carbon pricing for Canada’s higher gas prices compared with the United States. He and other opponents of the system have also blamed it for stoking inflation. But Tiff Macklem, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, has said carbon pricing accounts for a “quite small” proportion of inflation, pegging the effect at around 0.15 per cent.

Still, the carbon price has become increasing unpopular – as has the federal Liberal government – amid sharply rising costs for groceries and other goods and a slowing economy. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who leads Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in recent opinion polls, has vowed to scrap it.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ford also repeated his plea for Ottawa to scrap carbon pricing or at least exempt natural gas from the federal carbon tax. He has previously pointed to a carveout announced last year for heating oil that critics said disproportionately favoured Atlantic Canada, where heating oil is used by a much higher proportion of households than anywhere else in the country.

Asked by a reporter whether he thought stopping climate change was a priority, Mr. Ford insisted his government had done more than any other to reduce emissions, touting aid for major steelmakers to switch from coal-fired to electric furnaces, his public-transit expansion plans and recent announcements to expand nuclear power. But these measures have not yet resulted in any emissions reductions.

The province has said it is on track to hit its target to reduce emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. The majority of that reduction is due to the previous Liberal government’s phase-out of coal power plants.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the description of the province’s emissions reduction target, which is to reduce emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Feb. 16, 2024: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the federal carbon tax exemption for home heating oil only applied in Atlantic Canada. In fact, the exemption applies everywhere, though home heating oil is used by a larger proportion of households in Atlantic Canada than in other parts of the country. The article was updated again to make this correction.