Roundup: Not a tax but a regulatory charge

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The big news yesterday was that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 6-3 that the federal government’s carbon price backstop was indeed constitutional, and included in that ruling was that the price was not a tax, but a constitutionally valid regulatory charge. This is important for a couple of reasons – taxes go to general revenue, whereas regulatory charges must be cycled for specific purposes, and in this case, they are rebated to the provinces in which they are collected, and under the federal backstop, if a province doesn’t have a revenue recycling mechanism, these carbon charges are rebated at a rate whereby most households will get more back than they paid into it owing to the fact that institutions who pay the prices don’t get those same rebates.

Of course, you wouldn’t know it based on a bulk of the coverage in this country, for whom the common headline was “Supreme Court declares carbon tax constitutional.” CBC, iPolitics, The Globe and Mail, Global TV, the Postmedia chain – all of them using “carbon tax” throughout to describe the very ruling that says it’s not a tax. This matters for a couple of reasons – one of them is that calling it a tax is actively misleading as this charge does not go into general revenue. Why is that important? Recall that in the lead-up to the last election, then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer kept declaring that the federal “carbon tax” would keep increasing because the government needed the revenues to pay for their deficits – a lie because it’s not a tax, and those revenues got rebated to household. But he almost never got corrected on that, because people kept using “tax.” Erin O’Toole keeps offering the lie that this “tax” is punishing low-income households, again misleading because of the rebates, which again, few people correct him on.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1375152876641746947

The other reason it matters is because using “tax” fits it into a particular ideological framing device for which “taxes” are a bad thing. “Taxation is theft,” and all of that particular bullshit, but this is a particular frame that serves those narratives. Journalists should be under no obligation to carry water for those interests, and if anyone says “calling it a tax is just easier,” then you are party to misinformation. And I am starting to wonder how many of my journalist colleagues either didn’t pay attention or skipped the class in journalism school where we discussed framing devices and how they influence coverage. A few outlets were able to get the nomenclature correct – that others couldn’t is a problem.

Meanwhile, Jason Markusoff makes note of what certain premiers did and did not say about the result, given that this is now a reality that they will be forced to contend with. Heather Scoffield considers the decision the stake to the heart of governments’ ability to drag their feet on tackling climate change. Colby Cosh takes a deep dive into the ruling’s exploration of the Peace, Order and Good Government provisions of the constitution.

Good reads:

  • Chrystia Freeland tabled a bill that allocates another $7.2 billion in transfers to provinces, some $4 billion of that toward the Canada Health Transfer.
  • Our next Moderna shipment is going to be delayed by a few days because of a backlog in quality control measures – not export controls.
  • The government has indicated that they will tell their staffers to ignore summons to committee, owing to the principle of ministerial accountability.
  • The current military ombudsman is backing up his predecessor, saying he would have handled the allegations around General Vance in the same way.
  • The Auditor General released reports on early pandemic spending, public health and border issues, and the government’s infrastructure programme.
  • Here’s a look into the dissents to the Supreme Court’s carbon price ruling.
  • Matt Gurney wonders what Doug Ford’s purpose is any longer if he can’t be the budget hawk he rode into office claiming he was going to be.
  • Robert Hiltz delves into that report on the RCMP handling of the investigation into Colton Boushie’s death, and is boggled at the sheer number of failures identified. 

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: Not a tax but a regulatory charge”

  1. Conservatives, tax whiners and anti environmentalists have since the carbon levy’s inception have propagated the “big lie”, that being the levy is a “tax grab” and will impoverish Canadians. The government has done little to combat this lie, instead it has left it to fester. Of course it never talks about neutrality or touts the tax write-off or the checks that Canadians greedily cash. I find this unsettling. Now that the SCOC has ruled it will be interesting to see haw Kenney and Moe et al will twist themselves into pretzel to find ways to mitigate what they will continue to say is a grinding “tax.”

  2. The late Chief Justice of SCOTUS, Oliver Wendell Holmes, used to say “I enjoy paying taxes; they’re the price we pay to have civilization.” It appears then that the Conservatives, therefore, are uncivilized and apparently, “journalists” seem to enjoy cosplaying as cavepeople too. Why go into details and offer facts when it’s easier and more profitable to dumb down your audience to the same level of ooga-booga simplified language?

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