Jonathan Swift may not have thought much about things like climate change or carbon emissions, but the 17th century Irish satirist definitely could have predicted how the debate around them would unfold. As he wrote back in 1710, “falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” About this, at least, he wasn’t joking.
Three hundred years later, the truth is still no match for an honestly told lie. In some respects, it’s even less suited for the task than ever. Witness the disconnect between what we know about the carbon tax in Canada and the way it’s perceived by large swathes of the public. As a new paper from University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter shows, Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices. As Tombe noted in a long thread on social media, “that’s a tiny fraction of the 26 per cent rise in food prices in Canada over the past five years.”
This is important and useful academic research. It also comes limping along about three years too late to really matter in the grander scheme of things. Canadians are increasingly opposed to the carbon tax, and increasingly willing to blame it for the increase in food prices that has rocked households and economies across the developed world.
That’s largely a function of the Conservative Party of Canada’s aggressive campaign to paint the carbon tax as the source of all of Canada’s problems — and, by extension, their victory in the next election as the natural solution to them. There is no carbon tax correlation too spurious for the Conservatives to draw here, whether it’s rising food bank usage or declining per-capita economic prosperity.
In pursuit of this particular jest they’ve leaned heavily on the words and work of Sylvain Charlebois, the self-anointed “Food Professor”. Charlebois isn’t prepared to go along with some of their more exaggerated claims, but he has been openly hostile towards academic peers who have sought to quantify the carbon tax’s actual impact on food prices. His response to Tombe and Winters's new paper, for example, was to declare it “a clear example of carbon tax propaganda” and note that “Trevor Tombe is doing quite well with the Trudeau regime.”
Personal attacks notwithstanding, Charlebois’s own research on the subject doesn’t actually seem to disprove their findings. As his own recent paper on the carbon tax’s impact says, “food price inflation is a worldwide phenomenon that has several, diverse causes. Therefore, attributing food price hikes to a single exogenous source without accounting for other factors may only provide a limited understanding of the issue.” In other words, blaming the carbon tax for food price hikes — as Conservative partisans do each and every day — would be a mistake.
The same would seem to apply to the ongoing campaign to exaggerate its broader economic impact. After all, Charlebois’s most recent paper concludes with the observation that “without historical data at the firm level, we cannot provide evidence of the impact of carbon taxes on firm-level competitiveness and economic growth.” So much for the job-killing carbon tax that Conservatives love to talk about.
The problem here — well, one of them — is that this nuanced observation is only available if you read the paper itself rather than the framing of its contents and conclusions on social media. There, and especially on Twitter/X, it’s being presented by partisans as a slam dunk against the carbon tax and its supposedly massive impact on the cost of living. It’s yet another example of the different velocities at which economic facts and political fiction are able to travel, a gap that’s only gotten wider with the advent of speed-enhancing technologies like social media.
I don’t have an obvious or easy solution here — not, at least, one that’s politically feasible. There’s no universe where social media can be put back in its Pandora’s box, even if it would be better for almost all of us if it could. Any attempt to more effectively regulate the transmission of information on social media, much less actively contain the spread of falsehoods, would be inevitably characterized as an intolerable and undemocratic affront to free expression and liberty.
But the apparently inevitable demise of the carbon tax in Canada is an important reminder of how you can win a battle of the facts and still lose the war of competing truths. In politics, as Swift might have told us, it’s the tale that really matters in the end. The next time progressives get the chance to design another ambitious piece of policy, they’d probably do well to remember that.
Comments
It's a classic tale of how right-wing followers of the Corruption Party of Canada can turn a blind eye to the real truths. The people have lost the skill on how to fact check the nonsense being spewed by Pierre "Snake Oil Salesman" Poilievre and his band of misguided neanderthal MPs only interested in themselves than Canadians. Sure, the party pretends to care about Canadians, and tells them what they want to hear, rather than provide the true facts, but with the oil & gas industry in their back pockets, you know what the real agenda is by the conservatives.
Poilievre is a career politician that has accomplished ZERO his entire career, except to try and rig elections with his Orwellian "Fair Election Act", that backfired. It would have made it harder for First Nations and poor people to vote, and yet the party claims to represent all Canadians.
People follow Poilievre because he says what they want to hear. He will reduce their tax burden, and who can be against that! In attacking or ridiculing him, we are forced to repeat his message, and this reinforces it.
In retrospect, it is evident that the Liberals made a serious mistake by sending the Canada Carbon Rebate discretely into your bank account 4 times per year without even identifying it. They should have taken the opportunity to hammer their message daily by offering a negative sales tax on CO2-reducing consumer products, such as food and goods produced in Canada, energy efficient appliances, heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles , home energy retrofits, etc.
It might not be too late to change tactic!
I, myself, am not a fan of the carbon tax, for the simple reason that most of the people who pay it have no alternative: to be a *real* alternative, it has to be (a) available, and (b) affordable by the individual.
The people who own shares in gas and oil (and their dependent industries) can, for the most part, afford the carbon-reducing products and measures -- often with subsidies from government -- and then while they're collecting the dividends (perhaps in a tax-free vehicle), they can also collect the "gas tax credit."
Ironically, the amount of that federal credit varies from province to province, and is directly proportional to the amount of carbon/carbon equivalents attributable to the province -- that's right: the worse the carbon performance of the province, the bigger its residents' carbon credit.
So in effect, people-who-can-afford are rewarded essentially for being able to afford, while those who cannot, pay for it.
Governments do a lousey job of identifying direct deposits, period. And many people don't care why it shows up, or through which program. Many don't even pay attention to which level of government it comes from. I know that from chatting with people, including total strangers.
I agree with the fact that the governments have done a poor job at confounding disinformation. However, I reject the notion that only rich people and corporations are responsible for climate change. It's a societal issue that requires a societal response. We can't keep the system we have if we want to prevent catastrophe. That requires that everyone makes the changes. Sadly, I see no evidence that it is happening.
Many unfinished sentences.
1) Fawcett: "Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices."
… an extra cost that households in federal backstop provinces recover in rebates. In fact, most households stand to gain after rebate.
The carbon levy plus rebate is progressive climate policy. When Poilievre and Eby in B.C. axe the tax, modest-income households stand to lose the most.
Who wins when Poilievre axes the tax? Affluent energy hogs.
2) Fawcett: "Canadians are increasingly opposed to the carbon tax, and increasingly willing to blame it for the increase in food prices that has rocked households and economies across the developed world."
… including in nations that do not have carbon pricing.
So carbon pricing cannot be the culprit.
3) Fawcett: "That’s largely a function of the Conservative Party of Canada’s aggressive campaign to paint the carbon tax as the source of all of Canada’s problems … "
And in the same proportion a function of the Liberals' and NDP's failure to sell and defend their key climate policy.
If the Conservatives' confused Canadians about the carbon levy and lied to them about rebates, it was the governing party's job to unconfuse them and tell them the truth about rebates.
Instead, silence.
How could a vast swath of Canadians not understand the rebate side of the equation?
Politics is the art of the sale. Cars do not sell themselves. Carbon pricing does not sell itself either.
If you don't show up on the battlefield, you cannot expect to win.
The Liberals did not show up. The cowardly NDP are in full flight.
It's almost as if they wanted carbon pricing to fail.
Democracy depends on an informed electorate.
From Stephen Harper to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservatives pose a grave threat to democracy in Canada.
What a shame The Observer does not permit comments on the political activities of the self-anointed “Food Professor”. The Observer deleted all comments on its recent Charlebois exposé. Even though nothing readers could say could match Charlebois's own vitriol.
Someone has a thin skin. So we shall all have to bite our tongues.
"Sylvain Charlebois is Canada's 'Food Professor.' His take on food prices is helping shape our climate policy debate" (National Observer, 09-Oct-24)
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/10/09/news/sylvain-charlebois-car…
It would have been fair enough to suggest that NO has an obvious Liberal Party bias. But to call it "crooked" is a bit much.
It's my personal opinion that unless the comments used foul language, were racist or otherwise abusive or were utterly counter-factual to the point of being disinformation/propaganda, they should have been allowed to stay up. I see that comments cannot be added at this late date, either.
It's probably unwise for any researcher, academic or otherwise, to "give the benefit of the doubt" to anyone or anything, as it puts them in the camp of advocacy, not research. And why a researcher or educator would touch with a 10-foot pole a buzzword like "woke" is unfathomable.
Unfair, picky comments about an astute article. Credit where credit's due how about?
Actually, being the "historical" option, un"natural gas" sells itself as a heating option. On top of that, when my 40+ yo furnace died, I could get government help with a loan: but only for a gas furnace replacement. I got the kind that was supposed to be the most "efficient" ... but it uses just as much gas as the old one. The only plus is that it heats the house up faster when the heat's been turned way down, probably because the fan is strong enough to heat the upstairs as well as the downstairs; that's not necessarily a plus, as it costs about $10 a month more for the electricity to run that fan.
So much for certified "efficient" products.
I've been beyond appalled at the federal NDP's lack of climate policy.
The Conservatives pose and have long posed a grave threat, not only to democracy, but to science, fact, and the education, healthcare/health and general welfare/well-being of most of the country's population.
And the Liberals have for at least three decades now (and probably 5, if the research I did in the early 90s is accurate), continually spread shrinking program funds over larger and larger proportions of the populace, itself ever-increasing.
Government doesn't *think* (of course, it doesn't: individuals think) and increasingly those who make decisions confuse their bright ideas with thinking, which ultimately has to do with testing those bright ideas against a broad array of facts.
So policies hardly ever do what it was said say they were intended to do. They fairly consistently reward and punish the wrong people, and bully those least able to resist or fight back.
Very seldom do the politicians who purport to speak "for the little guy" have a blessed clue about the lot of "the little guy." And it's far, far to easy, I suspect, to confuse the needs and experience of the little guy with their own desires, experience and aspirations.
I could tell you stories ...
Idiocracy is what you get when the ignorant rule the sane. I am glad I will be dead soon. Humanity has failed.
Ignorance and sanity aren't mutually exclusive. Anyone who's glad they'll die soon must be in extraordinary pain occasioned by more than a belief that "humanity" has failed.
I think this is an outcome of platforms and news organizations bought and run by right wing billionaires. The truth on anything these days doesn't matter, just what is in that echo chamber. People want to believe it because it is so easy to blame others or policy that doesn't align with their beliefs.
For those people talking about doing a better job selling it, well they have tried that; however even supposed neutral media outlets focus strictly on the negative. Getting the message out is difficult these days.
Democracy all over the world is in peril because of it. Something HAS to be done about rampant and obvious mis/disinformation.
I saw on the crawl yesterday (a metaphor for where the truth is now) that Australia has passed a law preventing anyone under the age of 16 from using social media.
Max's cynicism about social media is understandable, but governments are still seen as responsible for keeping their citizens SAFE, are they not? This strikes me as the kind of bold move that is still possible; it's the kind of action I think most of us would like to see the Liberal government doing right now; they're just not meeting the moment. I mean, what's happened to Scott Moe?
Laws can make things illegal, but they can't prevent human action.
The draft law required uploading government-issued ID ... though with social media's rampant collection and concatenation of personal data, opinions, stated experiences, etc. it's kind of gilding the lily: for the most part, social media already has at its disposal all the information they'd need to disallow young users. But that's not in their business plans!
Governments haven't, AFAIK, *ever* kept citizens safe! They've been the hand-maidens of business, the monied classes, and their own international "reputations."
Very little is as we were taught it was as youngsters, at home, school or church. Most of it never was.
Unfortunately, the business models of new technologies are about breaking with the status quo, about "moving fast and breaking things." Not all, but a lot of the negative consequences could (and should) have been predicted and headed off at the pass. But no one was interested in spoiling a new, fun thing -- especially one that improved GDP. No one stops to think that what causes disease, and disease itself, also "improves" GDP!!!
Something happened to Scott Moe??? Did he have a "road to Damascus" experience or something I didn't hear about? (My hearing's not as good as it used to be ...)
Penny wise and pound foolish...that's too many of us. But for those of us getting off fossil gas, the carbon tax is pure reward. Ax the ICE man....if possible, before he cometh. P.P. for dog catcher, maybe. He's not PM material.