New federal clean fuel regulations, which take effect on Canada Day, are designed to cut pollution from vehicles. Although there won’t be much of a change to pump prices across the country on July 1, experts say, there will be a noticeable increase several years down the road. (Kyle Bakx/CBC)
Increased fuel costs are gonna disproportionately hurt the poor. The great thing about the carbon tax is that the rebate scales with income. This doesn’t.
This kind of policy feeds right-wing rhetoric that “elites” are using climate change to hurt the little guy.
Everything disproportionately hurts the poor. It’s so expensive to be poor, you have no idea unless for example you know or are someone trying to survive on the 13k the Ontario government says it is right and decent to give disabled people to live on.
I spent zero dollars on transportation over the last two years, and I took one round trip on the city bus the year before that. I spent zero dollars on clothes. The only thing this will affect in my life is the cost of food, since that is the only thing I can afford to spend money on, and there are so many larger problems presently affecting the cost of food it doesn’t even make sense to care about this.
We need to address the problem of poverty in Canada but not through undermining climate policy. It needs to be its own thing.
They aren’t using them to hurt the little guy intentionally, it’s just what generally ends up happening. Gas is much more affordable than the alternative. Imagine how much it will cost to develop the infrastructure for electric cars, make them widely available, and troubleshoot the technology to be effective in our climate year-round. There’s no way the wealthy allow those costs to be passed on to them. Those changes will be made with tax breaks and incentives, and they will be made with labor that could have been building reasonably priced housing. The costs of the cars themselves will be passed on to the consumer.
I don’t have an answer to this problem, but conservatives aren’t wrong to point out how elites still take their private jets everywhere, and profit from foreign trade deals where they offshore the pollution (and wages) for product development, while screwing the lower and middle classes over in the name of stopping climate change.
These extremely ineffective actions taken by left wing politicians are no where near enough to make a difference, but they are a great way to score easy votes and keep a lot of money out of the hands of the poor.
The good news is that populations worldwide are seeing decreased birth rates. Fewer humans is definitely in the top 5 of best ways to reduce our carbon footprint.
Edit: To be clear, the conservatives are just as ineffective and corrupt. The “right wing” isn’t necessarily the problem here. It’s that we have nothing but bad politicians across the board who can’t or won’t implement important sweeping changes, like developing nuclear power stations across the nation.