VICTORIA — The New Democrats finally moved Monday on their promise to eliminate the carbon tax, introducing legislation mere hours before the next increase was scheduled to kick in at midnight. Read More
Vaughn Palmer: The NDP had options for an early, properly debated law to end the carbon tax. Instead, it sought to avoid political damage
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VICTORIA — The New Democrats finally moved Monday on their promise to eliminate the carbon tax, introducing legislation mere hours before the next increase was scheduled to kick in at midnight.
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Premier David Eby took no responsibility for acting at the last possible minute.
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Instead, he attributed the urgency to the “threats coming out of the Trump White House” and the timing to Ottawa’s belated scrapping of its own, overarching carbon tax.
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Neither line of defence stood up to independent scrutiny.
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Informed Opinion
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The federal government reduced its carbon tax to zero on March 15. But as Eby himself conceded, “there were certainly campaign commitments about the carbon tax” going back to January.
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The New Democrats could have drafted and passed their own legislation in anticipation of Ottawa’s move back when the provincial house convened in February.
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Or they could have recalled the B.C. legislature as soon as Prime Minister Mark Carney made the reduction official, which would have allowed two weeks to debate the provincial version.
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As for Eby’s resort to the NDP’s all-purpose “blame Trump” line of defence, a reporter had to remind the premier that he had vowed to get rid of the carbon tax back in September.
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That was well before U.S. President Donald Trump took office and began bombarding B.C. and Canada with tariff threats.
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Eby, long a fervent defender of the carbon tax, only abandoned it in the face of internal opinion polls which showed the NDP was at risk of losing the October 2024 provincial election.
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When pressed Monday, the premier conceded that his reason for repealing the tax was “as true today” as when he made the promise more than six months ago.
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“The carbon tax played an important role here in British Columbia for many years, assisting us in reducing our emissions while our economy continued to grow. It was supported by parties from many different backgrounds in the province,” Eby explained.
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Now “the tax has become divisive,” said Eby. Also, “absolutely toxic.”
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The NDP leader attributed the fall of the tax to “a dedicated and concerted campaign by the Conservative party at the provincial level and at the federal level.”
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That was a telling admission on Eby’s part. This time last year he mocked the campaign against the carbon tax, branding it the work of far-right extremists and climate change deniers with little chance of success.