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Cap and trade: Let’s take a summer road trip to Cape Breton – but we’ll walk instead

March 17, 2016   ·   0 Comments

Here’s an idea. If your regular drive to work every morning is 25 km, how about driving only 20 of those kilometres, then pulling over, parking your car and doing the remaining five kilometres on foot?

It would be good for the environment and you would reduce your so called ‘carbon footprint’ on the planet.

Doesn’t sound very practical, does it?

If you’re one of the 22 per cent of Ontarians who agree that Kathleen Wynn’s ‘cap and trade’ tax plan is a good idea, then it would seem that not driving the entire way to work just might just be your heartfelt and sincere contribution to do your part at fighting climate change.

You can call this provincial government thing a ‘plan’ or a ‘program’ or any other such word the government uses while telling the public they’re taking more, but they refuse to use the word ‘tax’.

Raising the cost of gasoline by 4.3 cents a litre and the cost of natural gas by $5 per month is just another tax on the public in a never-ending saga of a government that spends too much and is sucking the life out of its citizens, 4.3 cents at a time.

The budget also allows for ‘certain corporations’ to be exempt from this tax. Why are corporations that are already making big dollars exempt while the average person just trying to make a decent living must pay?

This attempt by the government to make people ‘less reliant’ on automobiles is ridiculous. Especially for those that don’t live in the downtown core of Toronto, where Queens Park officials seem to assume we all live.

Let’s throw some actual facts into the equation when it comes to auto emissions.

The introduction of mandatory catalytic converters on all new automobiles greatly reduced the amount of harmful emissions – especially CO2. Couple that with cleaner fuel, the elimination of carburetors and other technological advances, and your car’s emissions have been reduced to a trickle compared to what they were 30 years ago.

In fact, the Ontario Drive Clean program, yet another program designed to make you pay, turned out to be an utter and total failure when it was revealed that 95 per cent of cars that took the test passed, and passed with flying colours, because modern cars are efficient. And yet they still require the test every two years for cars over a certain age and they still take the money from ordinary taxpayers.

If the government thinks this tax is going to make people in Ontario less reliant on cars to get around, they need to go back to geography class and learn a little about where they live.

Ontario is over 900,000 square kilometres in size. It’s larger than most European countries and outside of the GTA getting from town to town or just to the grocery store does require a car.

Dropping yet another tax on people isn’t going to convince anyone in a rural area to switch a bicycle to drive into town.

The worst part is you are never, ever, going to see any benefits from this program.

Ten years from now you will have not seen any change in the environment – at all – and most likely, no one is going to follow up on where all the money has gone and what, if any, benefit it has produced, because, as usual, once a tax is implemented people get used to it and forget about it.

If 22 per cent of the province’s residents agree with this plan, and 10 per cent have no opinion, as indicated by polls, that means 68 per cent of us don’t want another tax placed on gasoline. But of course far be it from the government to listen to its citizens.

Ontario is in a crisis situation with a current debt of over $308 billion. You can’t get your fiscal house back in order by continually increasing taxes on your citizens and making them poorer while telling them it’s ‘for the public good.’

As for being less reliant on automobiles to ‘protect the environment,’ why is it that the people who publicly scream about climate change – and that includes the phony Hollywood celebrities who travelled to Alberta to protest the oil sands – are the ones most likely to travel by air?

If government officials are so concerned about pollution, why do they still fly in jet aircraft that use massive amounts of petroleum-based fuel and spit out tons of pollutants on a single trip, rather than using a less polluting method of travel?

I guess that just wouldn’t be practical.

BRIAN LOCKHART
From the second row

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