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Liberal Government Knows The Cost of Canadian Carbon Tax

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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Canada’s Liberal government knows how much its increasingly despised federal carbon tax is going to cost taxpayers — but they won’t tell you. An internal memo from their finance department obtained by The National Post indicates the tax will gouge average Canadians.

The finance department has even calculated how much their “environmental levy” — as its sometimes referred to — will scrape from every individual household in Canada but it’s not telling any of them.

Titled, “Impact of a carbon price on households’ consumption costs across the income distribution,” the memo is authored by Jean-François Perreault, then-assistant deputy minister at Finance Canada.

But Perreault’s memo is heavily censored with lines rendered undecipherable with black markers. These include highly contentious claims of how many fewer megatons of greenhouse gasses will allegedly be reduced by a carbon tax.

One line that the government apparently missed reads, “These higher costs would then cascade through the economy in the form of higher prices, thus leading all firms and consumers to pay more for good and services with higher carbon content.”

Ottawa-area Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Pierre Poilievre first obtained the memo and he was on his feet Monday in the House of Commons during the daily question period, demanding that Finance Minister Bill Morneau come clean with the details.

“The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable. That is why I asked how it is this carbon tax will impact the poorest Canadians,” Poilievre said. “At first, the government said, ‘No such data exists’. Then it said, ‘It exists; we just don’t want to tell you what it is.’ That is the current position of the government, that it wants to keep secret from Canadians, the most vulnerable Canadians, those with the least, the impact of this heavy new carbon tax on heat, hydro, gas and electricity.”

Even when Poilievre requested the identical document through a parliamentary procedure that’s called an Order Paper Question the information was again redacted.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who is also adamantly refusing to implement any carbon tax in his province, is also challenging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to release the financial data.

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