@hewer_of_code
I'm in the middle of the prairies. Many people out here grumbled about the carbon tax, but it wasn't a huge make-or-break issue. The grumbling was mainly because the carbon tax affected some regions of the country more than others - Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland basically escaped it on their home electricity bills because of hydroelectric power and nuclear power, but out here in It's Winter Seven Months A Year land, it applied to every joule of electricity, every BTU of natural gas we heat with, and more.
Basically, we were paying more of this tax than many other places. So people grumbled, but they paid, and no one outside the oil-company boardrooms was spitting mad about it.
You know what killed the carbon tax? What turned it into a Big Hairy Deal? When the federal government removed the carbon tax from home heating oil in the Maritimes - heating oil, with a worse carbon footprint than anything else short of coal. And when people out here started asking why people in the Maritimes got relief from the tax while we didn't, a cabinet minister said that "Maybe you should elect more Liberals so you have someone to represent you in this government".
Nakedly saying that the Maritimes elected Liberals, so they got relief, while we elected others, and we get nothing.
Justin Trudeau politicized the carbon tax. And *that* is what killed it.
You can't blame it on the west.
#Canada #regionalism #politics #CanPol #CarbonTax #WesternAlienation #prairies
