Canada's carbon tax isn't working. It's time for it to go.

Monday’s vote on “axing the tax” on home heating should be viewed as a critical opportunity to innovate.

Ahead of a Wednesday morning caucus meeting, and as winter temperatures begin to set in across the country, federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre announced that his party would force a vote in the House of Commons on Monday to extend a three-year carbon tax exemption that was announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week for Atlantic Canadian heating oil to all forms of home heating in every part of Canada.

The temptation for the Liberals and their NDP coalition partners will be to continue to toe the line Trudeau took yesterday, which was that no additional carve-outs on the carbon tax would be forthcoming, and vote against Poilievre's motion.

But that position is a mistake, both politically and morally. If the Liberals and NDP care about public support for climate policy, the inflation crisis, and their jobs, they should vote in favour of Poilievre’s motion. 

Here's why.

While inflation and cost of living remain the top concerns of Canadians, a very recent survey by Leger suggested that about 70% of Canadians are worried about climate change. However, support for keeping Trudeau's signature climate policy, the carbon tax, only registers with the support of 18% of Canadians. The reason for the vast delta between public concern for addressing climate change and support for the carbon tax is something that few Liberal intelligentsia have considered. That blind spot is now both politically biting them in the rear and is likely preventing Canada from meeting its emissions reduction targets.

And that reason is that the carbon tax is failing to move consumer preferences away from high-carbon products and practices in the way Trudeau promised that it would, and Canadians know it. And in the middle of a generationally high cost of living crisis, all Canadians - even those very concerned about climate change - are unwilling to pay for a policy they consider ineffectual.

Said differently, people will only choose alternatives to driving and heating their homes with carbon-based fuel if other options exist, are available, and are affordable. Those circumstances might be partially available in other, more temperate, highly populated regions of the globe, but not so across much of Canada. So even though Trudeau is increasing the price of carbon fuel with his tax, Canadians aren't choosing to purchase alternatives because in most parts of Canada, they don't yet widely exist, or are completely unaffordable. This concept is simple to grasp for even the most politically disconnected Canadians, particularly when they fill up their car and pay a carbon tax but have no public transit alternatives or pay a carbon-based home heating bill for six months of brutal cold with no other option. 

And a decade of Liberal rule has also shown that their government isn't particularly good at getting these alternatives built, which has further added to the failure of the carbon tax to shift demand for carbon fuel. Few Canadians now believe the Liberals can do things like actually build out the infrastructure needed to pull gas-powered cars off the road, for the simple fact that they’ve failed to do so after nearly a decade in government. And this week’s serious whistleblower allegations regarding wrongdoing at a federal government agency that was supposed to spur the development and deployment of emissions reduction technologies will undoubtedly further erode public trust in the Liberal government's capacity to provide lower cost alternatives to carbon fuels.

These facts are laid bare in recent government reports that show that even with the tax, Canada will still probably miss its 2030 emissions targets by close to 50 percent.

There's proof of these facts in recent political trends, too. Trudeau's capitulation on the tax on heating oil should have been viewed as an inevitability by even the most lay observer - the signs have been present for months. For example, in August, a Nova Scotia provincial riding that has been a safe Liberal hold for time immemorial was flipped by provincial conservatives due mainly to the unpopularity of the federal Liberal carbon tax. Within Trudeau's federal caucus, there has also been extreme dissent over the issue, likely due to the sustained, precipitous dip in polls in the traditionally safe-for-the-Liberals electoral territory that is Atlantic Canada. 

These incidents followed nearly a year of high-profile campaigning by Poilievre against the tax on a message that was easy to grasp for millions of Canadians already grappling with increased living costs in the inflationary crisis. 

Now, that same crisis has overlaid onto the tax and means millions of Canadians face the prospect of choosing between heating and eating, never mind considering investing in expensive or non-existent alternatives to carbon fuels. Further, Trudeau's late-stage, partial capitulation on removing the tax only for heating oil but not for other carbon fuel also risks creating perverse incentives like the one mentioned by the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, Bruce McLauchlin, who suggested that Trudeau's partial tax exemption may generate demand for higher emitting heating oil in certain circumstances. Keeping the tax with regional inequities also will further divide the country at a time when the federal government should be working towards unifying policy.

So, contrary to the opinions of many left-leaning pundits, the Liberals shouldn't lean into the tax in a display of political backbone. The opposite is true. The Liberal's dogmatic adherence to the carbon tax as the silver bullet for climate action, while failing to deliver on a made-in-Canada plan that offers affordable and readily available alternatives in the context of Canada’s vast, cold, geographic reality, has likely stifled innovative thinking about how to actually lower emissions in our country.

It’s also bankrupting Canadians, and they know it, and they’ve had enough of it.

Hopefully, the Liberals and their NDP partners wake up ahead of Monday’s vote with the understanding that when something doesn't work, it's time to try a different approach.