IS THE CARBON TAX THE WAY TO GO?

Everybody wants to save the environment these days. People are going out in droves to purchase "environmentally friendly" products, just because they are labeled "green" or even decorated with pretty green packaging. A marketing ploy, if you ask me ... as at least one environmental research group determined that many of these "environmentally friendly" products are in fact no better than the products they are replacing.

Nevertheless, politicians are picking up from the "green" movement in waves. We even have a Green Party, in addition to all the other Parliamentary noise that some people call political parties. All of them in some sense are now jumping on the environmental bandwagon. In return for the Conservative's repudiation of Kyoto, they want to promise different incentives for people who go "green": tax breaks for people that use the bus, rebates for people who buy a hybrid car, refunds for people that do "green" renovations to their homes, etc.

The Liberals under the leadership of Stephane Dion now want to introduce a carbon tax, copying their right wing cousins in British Columbia who also jumped on a similar bandwagon about a year ago. The NDP has a foggy plan to "make polluters pay"; however that gets implemented, I supposed that will all come out in the wash. However, because Dion seems to be dragging people over to the Liberals' side with his proposed carbon tax, all the other parties decided to oppose it. To me, I am uncertain because there are too many unanswered questions about it ... henceforth, virtually all of these policies have unanswered questions until the party in question gets elected and does even more to screw things up than they already are. I feel the carbon tax might just fit that bill, if there ever was one.

A carbon tax is supposed to tax consumption, as opposed to income. The more one consumes, the more one will have to pay. Henceforth, this is not some vague 'pie in the sky' promise to tax people who are doing the pollution, but a way of making consumers pay MORE to use almost anything, eat most foods, heat their homes, drive their cars, etc. Those crazy people that protest gas price hikes will really be in a frenzy with the proposed carbon tax, as the cost of fuel will be increased even more and as such, any goods that are transported this way.

Hey, Dion, have you ever heard of this term called "energy poverty"? Obviously not, or he would have thought this through before pushing for the same. His only answer to this concern is to provide a deep income tax cut in return for raising the prices on almost anything we use and the food that we eat. The key issue here is that low-income and poor people do not pay a lot of income taxes, so an income tax cut for this group is useless to them as they get hit with higher and higher prices.

Since the provincial Liberals got into power in Ontario, the price of heating fuels and electricity more than doubled for the average consumer, while we all had to listen to endless platitudes about how we can buy "energy efficient" appliances, insulate our home, use less, etc. to cut our costs ... but, of course, Dalton McGuinty and his gang also forgot one thing: low-income people do not have the capital to purchase "energy efficient" appliances, re-insulate their homes or do other "green" changes to their homes to save money -- and this is just for the homeowners. At the same time, nobody gets any assistance in paying their skyrocketing bills either, as energy costs eat up more and more of our meagre incomes.

Many tenants are forced to pay their own utilities, yet they cannot force their landlords to do the above changes and are in turn, stuck paying higher and higher costs just to keep a roof over their heads. If they don't pay their own utilities, the Landlord and Tenant Board will only be too pleased to grant an above guideline increase to landlords stuck with paying higher costs just the same. It has already gotten bad here in Ontario WITHOUT a carbon tax to go with it, so why do we want to pay higher prices for the same thing? Is the government going to give low-income people a substantial increase in wages and social assistance? I doubt it.

For example, my utilities and bills are more than my monthly mortgage and property taxes combined. By the time I finish paying for my mortgage, taxes, utilities and other related housing bills, I am broke. This is the same Premier who promises to help small businesses and to turn around this bad economy. Yeah, right. When I am busy paying more and more for utilities, I have even less left to cover "discretionary" expenses. So, people like me and many thousands more alike, have to apologize to the small business community because we don't have any "discretionary" income left. I suppose that is okay, as this government wants everybody on welfare anyways.

Income taxes don't interest most low-income, poor and even most middle class people ... taxes have been cut and cut and cut over the past couple of decades and all we have seen are cuts to public services in return. In return for the last round of income tax cuts, people have found themselves out of pocket more at the doctor's, at the pharmacy, at the optometrist and even paying for more municipal services that used to be provided for free. The last I checked, our educational system is also paid for through taxes, but due to the 'death by a thousand cuts' over the past decade and a half, parents are expected to pay for more and more for their children's education, including basic items such as textbooks and class supplies. If you can't afford them, you are supposed to go crying poor to the school so some damned charity can look after you ... something that is supposed to be confidential, but we all know how confidential these things are when your children's peers begin to notice things, regardless of how much "help" they get.

So, now the air we breathe is going to be taxed as well? I suppose the low-income families can "cut back" by not turning on their heat in the middle of January or walking across town back and forth each day because they could no longer afford the bus and certainly cannot afford a car! In the summer, the poor and low-income are supposed to swelter in the heat, regardless of how it makes them feel. Only the rich deserve any comfort.

So, will this carbon tax work? Absolutely not! Think of it yourself. If you are presently in a financially comfortable position -- maybe not rich, but at least middle class -- you may grumble about the price of gas, or the increased cost of hydro, but you still pay it, right? You can still pay these bills without having to forgo some other luxury like food, for example. Therefore, you probably do not feel a great need to cut back or get "energy efficient" appliances (unless you can be convinced of finding a deal or getting enough of a rebate to 'pull' you in that direction). You will just keep right on using your dishwasher, your washer and dryer and drive your SUV to the corner store, as long as the costs don't go too high ...

... and that's exactly what will happen. People will pay this carbon tax as the cost of doing business. Wealthy people that have bigger homes, bigger cars and bigger bank accounts wouldn't care less if they had to pay a little more for heating their twelve mansions and their summer cottage by Algonquin Park. Even the middle class will continue to pay ... Some may cut back some, but not in a substantial way as to reduce their overall carbon footprint. For example, they may opt for a "staycation" as opposed to going to the cottage for three weeks in the summer. Low-income people have NOWHERE ELSE TO CUT BACK. More and more of them will have to choose to feed the family or pay their heating bills. Like, when are these well-intentioned politicians going to learn that what they propose does not work for the poor?

My guess is as good as any. First, the poor are rarely consulted about anything. Programs and services are created by people who will never need them. People paid to run these programs and services are well compensated and certainly will not want to see their programs cut for lack of effectiveness, so the incentive here is to "create" results, as opposed to producing them. These same people are the same folks clamouring for more tax cuts, thinking that only if they paid several thousands of dollars less a year in taxes, they can always give more to the food bank, the homeless shelter and soon, the charity hospitals once our health care is privatized enough to satisfy some of these right wingers.

One of my previous posts shows how the charitable sector is not created by and for the poor. Eighty percent of monies allocated to the poor benefit the "middle class" and the crumbs left over hardly help those intended to be served by the same. Those operating charities hardly ever ask those they serve what they need; they just impose ... and assume that what they do is "doing good" when in fact they are just perpetuating the poverty the person is in. I assume more people upon learning about the energy poverty that will be succumbing more and more families as a result of this carbon tax will assume more donations to the food bank will help ...

No, the poor want to be given a hand UP and then be left alone. It is so interesting when one or more of these right wingers ever have to go to the other side of tracks through "no fault of their own", they will finally discover the true effect of their earlier good intentions and why and how they went wrong. Before it is too late, Stephane Dion, talk to a few of us who can see through your sudden interest in the "environment" and challenge you to reduce poverty too ...

I want this issue to be one of the key election issues if there is a federal election held this fall, which it seems there will be because Stephen Harper appears to want to give up the ghost early instead of waiting until next year for the election date he originally promised. Oh well, life goes on.

SKIRTING THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

By now, all of my readers likely heard about former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's fanciful tour about the planet ranting on and on about the "inconvenient truth"; how global warming and climate change is all our fault and that it is pretty well too late. The planet is doomed.

Nevertheless, despite this gloom, more and more of us are becoming "green". We are joining the "green train" of sorts, whereas everything we buy, ingest, bathe in, drive or ride in, or become a part of must be environmentally correct. That is, we must reprimand fast food outlets that dare to still use styrofoam packaging for their high trans-fat treats they continue to sell unabated to a knowing, but evasive population. The least they can do is wrap their toxins in biodegradable packaging!

At the same time, most of us continue to drive our cars to these fat food places, use their drive throughs, idle our engines to no end and as we leave, we bitch to the passengers beside us about the high gas prices. In fact, people like this are all over the Internet. People are becoming quite manic about the rising price of gas, yet at the same time they do not blink an eye when they drive their SUVs to the corner store or around the block to their children's school. Nobody walks or takes the bus anymore. The interesting thing is none of these folks seem to associate the rising rate of obesity among certain populations with this very behaviour.

Once, a friend of mine tried to get me to pass along a major protest against gas prices to other people on my address list. They wanted EVERYBODY to boycott the big oil companies and only use "independent" gas retailers during some specified day or week or month or so. I wrote my friend back to tell them the only way the price of gas is going to come down is if people drive less. Gas is like a drug. People use gas for almost anything. We heat our homes with it, drive our cars with it, power our lawn mowers with it, operate our boats with it, etc. It just seems to me whenever I tell people that the ONLY way to cut the price of gas is to drive less, they get into a real frenzy. Well, as long as people are addicted to the wheels of their car, the suppliers of fuel will hike their prices to whatever they think people will pay to keep this circus moving along.

There are websites like http://www.torontogasprices.com/ and http://www.gastips.com/ that allegedly tell people via the web where the cheapest gas prices are in town, encouraging every man, woman or small child in a gas powered trike to drive over there to fill up. That is also stupid too, because all you are doing is increasing demand at that one source, which will eventually have to hike their own prices imminently to protect their supply. Are we really being smart anyways with all these gas price protests? When we learn that all of our petty protests fail to bring gas prices down, we turn to the government. Can politicians *really* do something about the price of gas? Put it another way. Can government *really* control the prices of anything else, ranging from chocolate bars to ice cream to clothing to furniture? If they can't do anything about these other prices, why do people think the government can wave it's invisible hand over the gas markets and force the prices down? Bad news, folks. Gas prices are expected to go up even further.

So, people - we are facing another inconvenient truth. We are facing the truth about the price of ownership and operation of motor vehicles. At one time, Henry Ford stated with pride about how he can reproduce his product more efficiently and cheaply by inventing the assembly line ... but today, we need to question why so many gas guzzlers are still coming off the line and why so many people are still buying them. Somebody told me that gas guzzling cars like SUVs and Hummers have actually increased their sales by over 20% over the year prior ... and yes, right after we were shown Al Gore's piece of rhetoric, many people just went out and did what they want anyways. That is probably why people like Gore say it is too late.

What about other things that people do to waste environmental resources? I walk up and down our main drag several times a day to meet with clients, check on existing files, take pictures (where relevant to a case), or do banking. In addition to the usual assembly line of dope deals and graffiti artists that run when they see me coming, I notice variety stores that continue to keep their air conditioning on full blast and keep their front doors wide open ... symbolically, I suppose, in a lame attempt to lower the temperature of the outside. Sorry, that isn't going to work. I also notice large garbage bins behind many business establishments that contain way too many recycleables for my liking. I've seen the following items being disposed destined for our landfills: old computer monitors, old floppy disks, burnt out light bulbs, plastic grocery bags, radios, televisions, organics, etc. Obviously, 90% of us do not practice the 3 R's: reduce, reuse and recycle.

Further along, I walk into our friendly neighbourhood courthouse to drop off some documents. After passing through security and avoiding the body cavity searches one more time, I approach the civil counter and find myself freezing all of a sudden. The court clerks all have coats on and people are running around wearing mitts and gloves ... I was surprised nobody tried to start an indoor snowball fight! There's no need for air conditioning to be kept at such low levels that winter-time memories are so near. Christmas is over. Give it a rest.

I then walk towards my bank. On my way naturally, I encounter the friendly neighbourhood hot dog man who uses natural gas to fuel his grill. I ask him about his suppliers. He told me he found a fine place in a city an hour's drive from here. Hmmm, there are no local suppliers? Anyways, I ordered a grilled sausage with all the fixings and a diet Coke and walked away. I ate on the run; after all, I do have to burn off the calories I am taking in with something, right? By the time I reached my bank, I noted there were no trash cans around to put the napkin and the Coke can away, so I walked a few metres to find one that was overflowing, leaving more on the ground than in the actual can. Recycling bins are nowhere to be seen, of course. It must be the city workers' day off.

At the bank, I grab enough cash so that I can go grocery shopping the next day. I then stop on my way back to my office at the office supplies store across the way. I pick up a number of items (on plastic as usual), including a toner cartridge (something that seems to perpetually run out, even in my laser printer), more pens (because clients perpetually steal them from the office when I have them in to sign documents), more disks and CDs, as well as a table fan. It seems the people that run my building don't believe in air conditioning, so I have to use my own air cooler (which by the way takes up more kilowatt hours than a regular air conditioner, but I have no choice). I then drop off the items to my office, take a sugar-free Red Bull drink from my small efficiency fridge and drink it to catch up on sleep I never get.

My office is on a street that time forgot. The downtown revitalization types believe that all we need to do is make St. Paul Street two ways again, instead of the one way traffic direction it is now. I don't see how that will help, other than give people an opportunity to see old, broken down buildings, graffiti and the engrained drug culture of the Garbage City two ways instead of only one. Besides that, I know from riding the bus that this street isn't even wide enough. One way traffic is difficult enough to manage with the hoards of delivery vans, people trying to park and others on foot trying to cross the street. If it becomes two way, cyclists will only drive their bikes more often on the sidewalk, which only further marginalizes pedestrians. This will only make St. Paul Street even more unsafe than it already is, which to me, only drives people away from downtown instead of attracting them to downtown. The two-way street advocates claim this is good for the wine route. In my view, would this not be better to be rebuilt into a pedestrian roadway instead of reverting to two-way traffic? The last time I heard, it was not safe to drink and drive anyways.

After my day is done, I go home. I usually walk home or bus it home. I do have a bus pass, so I never have to dig for change when I need to get on. If I do work late or the weather is inclement, I use a cab, as it is fifteen minutes from the nearest bus stop to my house. I wish other people used the bus too; if they did, the bus service would be more frequent and have more routes covering a larger geographic area. However, because no matter what public transit is available in our region, people still insist on polluting the environment with their SUVs and Hummers, while the rest of us have to breathe the air and put up with their "road hogging" behaviour, even when pedestrians or cyclists lawfully have the right of way.

Anyhow, the next day I do my grocery shopping. I don't have a grocery store in my neighbourhood (because I choose to live far away from certain parts of civilization I tolerate each day at the office). Therefore, we have to either take a bus to the grocery store - which is hefty if all of us go. It is cheaper and probably better for my waistline if we walked, although the walk can be forty-five minutes in length. The interesting thing is that our government and public health people try to cram down our throats that we MUST eat more fruits and vegetables and keep our shopping to the outer tier of the aisles. I live in a Region that includes a substantial number of farmers and agricultural businesses. Niagara's tender fruit industry is among the best known in the world. These same farms also produce a full range of vegetables as well. However, when you set foot in the grocery store, do we see any Niagara fruits and vegetables for sale? Of course, not!

We are told we can travel (meaning only drive) to Vineland or Jordan or Merritville Highway or wherever else to find ubiquitous fruit and vegetable stands put out by farmers or go to various markets located on the other side of Fourth Avenue or downtown as well. This is not practical unless you have a vehicle, which again is polluting the air as you get to the fruits and vegetables that are locally grown, so if you don't drive you are stuck purchasing fruits and vegetables that have been transported from even further away in order to get our daily requirements. Greenhouse gases increase the further one must drive to deliver what they have to deliver. Grocery stores that call themselves "fresh" anywhere in their name are lying to you.

Anyhow, it doesn't really matter what you eat anyways. You have to wash everything off the best you can, unless you can afford to purchase 100% organic product - however, even the term "organic" can't be relied upon anymore. In my household, we frequently run out of food before the next grocery day, two weeks' away. I will simply not purchase anything in between. It is the fault of people who eat too much during the first week if it can't last during the second week. Try to live on a budget for $850-$1,000 per month for groceries, only to have them run out on you before the end of the first week. I end up having to get fresh fruits and vegetables from the market uptown, or from the corner store, as I have to eat properly even if others in my household choose not to.

But, everybody wants to go "green", I hear. That could have fooled me. Until the day I see packed buses taking people to every corner of this city and this region, with less cars on the road and less use of fossil fuels for things like air conditioning to be blown full-blast to the great outdoors, I will believe this Inconvenient Truth is only too inconvenient for those among us that have the money to blow on higher fuel costs anyways, though it continues to be the Canadian way to bitch about these things, but do nothing. Personally, I wouldn't mind if gas for cars went up to $5 a litre, with an exemption only for those that use their vehicles for business or courier purposes. In many European countries, gas is running at about $3 -$4 a litre and probably getting higher; in addition, many of these same cities charge toll fees for private automobiles coming into the city. If our cities suddenly decided to take this turn and use the extra fees towards transit, people would throw a fit ... the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution would mean nothing at that point. We would be taking the drug away from the addicts to a point that there would have to be a black market somewhere.

Our own Region wants to extend two different highways, add more lanes, as well as get the province to increase the number of lanes from four to eight on the Queen Elizabeth Way, as well as build a brand new Niagara-GTA corridor at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. To me, it just means more smog in the air for me to breathe, not a good thing for a region that already has a higher proportion of persons suffering from respiratory conditions, as well as more tax dollars sucked away from people like me for things I will not likely use. Big box stores will continue to dominate the market, forcing more and more people to stay in their cars to go to shop. Parking is "free" or so they think. Yet, people like me pay the same prices as those who park their cars at the same stores ... even though I didn't benefit from the "free parking" that I indirectly paid for like they did. People who drive continuously bitch that people that use transit do not cover the full cost of fares; yet, those who drive do not even come close to covering the true cost of their own addiction. Someday, I may just ask for my money back.

But then again, the Truth that I am telling you may just be too inconvenient for you to understand. You may be "green" in principle, but know absolutely nothing about what it means to actually BE "green". As Al Gore said, it may already be too late ...