Albertans to receive the highest carbon gift

The carbon gift is not a lump of coal. Albertans will receive the highest carbon tax rebate of any of the four provinces who have opted out of the federal plan. A family of four will receive an average tax credit of $888, compared to families in the other holdout provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan who can claim a credit of $448, $486 and $809, respectively.

imge: Pinterest

Let’s call it a gift, not a rebate because most Albertans will receive more back than they pay in the so-called carbon tax. According to calculations by economists Jennifer Winter and Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary, 80 per cent of Alberta households will get more back from the credit than they will pay in increased costs (Globe and Mail, Dec. 19, 2019).

And can we really call it a carbon tax when it isn’t really isn’t? Taxes are collected by governments to pay for health care, roads, education and so on. The goal of the carbon transfer is to reduce fossil fuel consumption, not to collect taxes. Let’s call it a carbon transfer. Money is just collected and redistributed.

The names given to the carbon transfer and carbon gift are politically motivated.  Conservatives prefer to call it a tax because it suits their political agenda of characterizing the fed’s actions to reduce fossil fuel consumption as a tax grab. The feds like calling the carbon gift “climate action incentive payments” because they like to pretend that we will meet carbon reduction targets.

And the federal Liberals are not rewarding Albertans for shutting them out of the province in the last election. The carbon gift is higher there because it covers a longer period of time than the other provinces and because Albertans spend more on fossil fuels.

You might wonder who’s paying for the carbon gift if it’s revenue neutral. Who is paying more than they receive?  It turns out that businesses are.

For struggling businesses, the carbon transfer seems unfair. But the holdout provinces are responsible for that: if they had devised their own carbon transfer system, the one proposed by the feds wouldn’t be in place. All provinces are free to create their own systems. Presumably, they could devise a system where taxpayers end up giving a carbon gift to small businesses. By refusing to create their own plan, they are accepting the fed’s by default.

B.C.’s carbon transfer is a model for the rest of Canada to follow. Businesses are not hurt –in fact they receive a reduction in taxes, as do personal taxpayers. Introduced in 2008, it has reduced per-capita emissions by 12 per cent and contrary to what conservatives claim, it hasn’t hurt the economy.

B.C.’ carbon transfer is also a model for conservatives because it was introduced by the BC Liberals, a conservative government. If the BC Liberals could introduce a carbon transfer and get re-elected, any conservative government could.

Pricing carbon is an easy sell to voters because most Canadians agree on pricing pollution, led by BC (84%) and trailing in Alberta where it’s still a majority (69%). And if there is no net cost to taxpayers, what’s not to like?

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The bitter side of honey

Becoming bee friendly is a good first step for the city. Now Kamloops needs to become honey friendly.

Bee City Canada

Canadian and American consumers are getting stung with fake honey. Much of comes from China, the world’s largest honey producer but you wouldn’t know it. Chinese honey is being laundered.

The label rarely says “made in China.” Instead, it will show the country of origin as being from countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan: suspiciously, places that ordinarily don’t produce much honey.

An investigation by the Globe and Mail found that Chinese producers export cheap and often contaminated honey to countries mislabelled as molasses, fructose or glucose syrup so customs officials don’t become suspicious.

The Chinese honey is filtered to remove any soil or pollen that would identify the county of origin and exported to countries around the world.

Worse still, the Chinese honey may be contaminated with antibiotics and adulterated with sugar:

“Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.”

The importation of fake and imported honey leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of Neil Specht. The Saskatchewan honey producer has seen the price of honey drop from $2.43 to $1.11 a pound last year due to the flood of imported honey into Canada.

“There are few, if any, honey producers that can operate at $1.11 per pound,” Specht told Walrus magazine. “I would suspect the costs of production for most are in the $1.60 to $1.65 range.”

Specht had a bumper crop last year, more than 500,000 pounds, and he’s not sure what to do with it. He could sell it at a loss or keep it in hopes that prices will improve. He normally sells his honey to the Western Canadian co-operative Bee Maid.

Consumer confusion over labelling doesn’t help. When buyers see “Canada No. 1” on a label, they think it’s produced in Canada. But that is just an indication of grade, not country of origin. Fine print may reveal the true source.

Canadian honey producers are understandingly upset. Manitoba bee keeper Allan Campbell alleges that Canada’s largest honey packer, Billy Bee, is marketing their honey as pure Canadian while as much as one-half of the contents may imported. Spokespeople for Billy Bee deny this, insisting that their honey is eighty-five per cent Canadian. Billy Bee brand is a blend of Canadian and Argentine honeys while their Natural Honey Farms brand contains honey from China.

It’s well and good for Kamloops to promote healthy ecosystems for bees; they pollinate much of the food we eat. However, the honey they produce is worth protecting as well. I don’t mean just the honey bought at Kamloops’ Farmers Markets, which I would think is pure Canadian, but also the honey sold on grocery store shelves.

The bee-friendly brand is cute but the hard work is lobbying governments to remove deceptive labelling so that it’s clear what consumers are buying in bee-friendly Kamloops.