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The truth is coming out on the carbon tax

The carbon tax has been blamed by Conservatives for Canada's rising food prices for years now. New research suggests that's a mistake. Will anyone actually listen to it? Photo by Matheus Cenali via Pexels

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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. 

A pair of University of Calgary economists have isolated the impact of the carbon tax on food price inflation — and found that it barely registers. But after years of Conservative attacks on the issue, will the facts even matter to people?

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. 

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