Language is politics
Why we need to talk about pricing greenhouse gases in the right way
With prepared remarks from Kristyn Annis, Canadians for Clean Prosperity, at the Pricing Carbon Forum on Tuesday, January 27th, 2015
Preston Manning wrote an article recently about talking about carbon pricing. He advised those trying to communicate to others about pricing carbon should avoid using the term “tax” because of its politically loaded connotations.
Mr. Manning is right — a “tax” is money that is collected by government and goes into the general coffers to fund government programs. You would be crazy to ‘like’ taxes. “Carbon tax”, therefore, becomes a political non-starter before anyone has a chance to explain its economic benefits to average Canadians. But we would go even further and say that we shouldn’t use “tax” because it doesn’t accurately describe what is accomplished when we charge to emit greenhouse gas pollution.
The proper word is “fee”
We need a fee on greenhouse gas pollution because it imposes real costs on society and on the average family, and threatens our security and prosperity. Not because government needs more revenue. A fee on greenhouse gas pollution can capture that cost and charge it back to where it rightly belongs — the polluter. In a sense, this is a fee paid by the polluter allowing them to dump greenhouse gas pollution, the same way we pay a fee to take our trash to the dump.
If we look at greenhouse gas pollution this way, it seems absurd to be paying for other people’s pollution. You wouldn’t pay for someone else’s trash at the dump, much less their dry cleaning or for their parking tickets. But you are paying for their pollution and, if we call it like it is, that’s a pollution subsidy. The only way for you to stop subsidizing pollution is if they pay for it themselves. Polluters should be financially responsible for their pollution. Period. The mechanism to put the brakes on pollution subsidies is… you got it — a greenhouse gas pollution fee.
It’s important that we put this into the right framework for this important economic growth policy to succeed. A greenhouse gas pollution fee is a mechanism for leveling the playing field and rewarding those that pollute less. Asking to change one word in a term may, at first, seem like a nit-picky demand. The fact is, however, that the language we use around any idea can have a huge impact on the way people view that idea. Language matters because greenhouse gas pollution pricing is politics.
Other Canadian provinces have successfully navigated the treacherous political waters and have moved ahead with pollution pricing: B.C. has a greenhouse gas pollution fee; Quebec has a cap-and-trade model; and Alberta has a $15-a-tonne levy.
It’s now Ontario’s turn. Though Premier Wynne has committed to putting a price on carbon as recently as January, Finance Minister Charles Sousa said today that a simple greenhouse gas pollution fee will not, as of now, be included in his budget. This comes after a recent Forum Research poll that showed only one third of Ontarians approve of putting a price on greenhouse gas pollution.
Ontarians are rightly worried that a greenhouse gas pollution fee could raise the price of dirtier products. But, apart from the language, it’s possible that we’re looking at the issue the wrong way. A greenhouse gas pollution fee is an opportunity to fund tax reductions, dollar for dollar, on things that grow our economy like jobs and income. B.C. funded $5.6 billion worth of tax reductions over the past 6 years, and now has the lowest corporate income taxes in Canada. The other upside? Greenhouse gas pollution has gone down.
Ontario is missing a huge opportunity to price greenhouse gas pollution the right way: a fully-refunded greenhouse gas pollution fee where 100% of revenues are used to reduce taxes. This would compensate for any extra costs brought on by the fee (which, by the way, businesses will compete and innovate to reduce), contrary to what most think. If Ontarians were communicated to accurately and precisely about pricing greenhouse gas pollution fee, that Forum poll may show some very different results.
