Axe the Tax. It’s a three word phrase that most Canadians have heard over and over again for years. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre famously made the slogan and its subsequent policy promise a centrepiece of his party’s election campaign since he became the leader of the opposition three years ago.
It appears on lawn signs, stickers, buttons, t-shirts and sweaters, and all other sorts of paraphernalia. Now it adorns the cover of a book published just in time for the April 28 Federal Election. On April 16, copies of the book and its author were at the Ducks on the Roof sports bar in Cochrane for a meet-and-greet and book signing event.
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax was written by Franco Terrazzano, the Executive Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). For seven years Terrazzano has been with the CTF, first as its Alberta director, and has spent the last four years as the Federation’s chief in Ottawa.
Terrazzano is young–only 32–and has spent the majority of his professional career in a “fight” against the carbon tax, a battle he describes as akin to a David vs. Goliath. He finished writing the book in January, not knowing that the country’s leadership and the political landscape would be changing drastically in just a few weeks. His stop in Cochrane was just one event on a western Canada book tour that has taken him all over the province.
In early March, new Liberal leader and prime minister Mark Carney, assuming party leadership from embattled former prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose support and implementation of the federal carbon tax was central to the government’s environmental policy, made his first official act as prime minister the “cancellation” of the carbon tax.
However, the fight did not end for the Taxpayer’s Federation. Terrazzano argues that the carbon tax was not cancelled and shelved forever, only reduced to zero, with the potential for a new government to bring the policy back once the public demand cools off.
“After the election, when politicians are done singing for their supper at the doors, they can still go back into the House of Commons and crank the carbon tax back up,” Terrazzano said while sitting in a booth in one of the corners of Ducks on the Roof.
In his book, Terrazzano lays out the decades long history of the carbon tax, and argues that the policy raises prices for consumers and increases the cost of living for ordinary people, while also not being an effective tool to curb carbon emissions.
Terrazzano writes, “making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India, or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.”
“[The CTF] thought it was important to show the history of the carbon tax,” Terrazzano said. “It was, and will always be, a bad deal for Canadians. It makes the necessities of life more expensive and it doesn’t work as an environmental solution.”
For Terrazzano, the fatal flaw of the carbon tax is that it doesn’t do anything to help the environment. He argues in his book that making things more expensive for Canadians doesn’t reduce emissions in China or move the needle in reducing global carbon emissions overall.
Terrazzano acknowledged that the publication of his book is very timely. The Federal election has firmly put affordability and environmental issues at the forefront of the public political discourse once again. All major parties have made promises to tackle rising affordability and the Conservatives are still carrying the banner of “Axe the Tax” well after Prime Minister Carney and the Liberals have supposedly cancelled it.
For Terrazzano and the CTF, it’s not a choice between lowering the cost of things or fighting environmental destruction by reducing carbon emissions. Terazzano believes there can be a balance that does both.
“I think all Canadians care about the environment,” he said. “The way to do that is to sell cleaner forms of energy to displace and replace dirty forms of energy being consumed abroad.”
