Montreal, Canada – For years, Pierre Poilievre has hammered home a simple slogan: “Axe the tax.”
The leader of Canada’s opposition Conservative Party — who is widely expected to become prime minister this year — has vowed to repeal a carbon pricing scheme enacted by outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
The policy put an added cost on fossil fuel products such as petrol, as part of the country’s push to reduce emissions and tackle the climate crisis.
Dubbing it a “carbon tax”, Poilievre has blamed the environmental programme for an affordability crisis in Canada — despite research that shows carbon pricing has had a negligible effect on inflation. He has also pledged to “axe the tax for everyone forever”.
“We need a carbon tax election to fire them all and bring home a common-sense Conservative government,” he said in a recent video posted on social media, referring to the Liberals.
The Conservatives are hoping that their anti-carbon tax strategy will pay off an upcoming federal vote, as Canadians continue to struggle with high grocery and housing costs.
Experts say the Tories’ campaign has made carbon pricing a hard sell politically, with even the frontrunners in the race to replace Trudeau as head of the ruling Liberal Party backing away from the policy.
“The Conservatives in particular have made a lot of political hay from fighting back on carbon pricing. ‘Axe the tax’ is now the central pillar of the federal Conservative campaign strategy,” said Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“There’s certainly some political opportunism happening here. The Conservatives see this as a winning issue, and so they double and triple down and have turned it into a controversial position.”
Yet Mertins-Kirkwood said the political rhetoric around carbon pricing has “dramatically overblown” the issue, both in terms of its effects on affordability and its importance in the overall climate fight.
“The issue is that it’s become this political football, this symbol of government overreach on the one hand and then the epitome of climate policy on the other hand. And I just think it’s neither of those things.”
What is a carbon price?
In 2018, Canada enacted the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, establishing minimum national standards for carbon pricing in provinces and territories across the country.
The federal government put two systems in place: one for large industrial polluters and one for Canadian consumers.
The consumer carbon price — which is what has drawn the most scrutiny and political ire — placed levies on everyday purchases of fossil fuel products, such as diesel, petrol and natural gas.
These levies have increased over time. The latest hike in April meant that the policy now costs $0.12 ($0.176 Canadian) more per litre of petrol, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (PDF).
The thinking is that by increasing the cost of fossil fuels, Canadian consumers will be forced to change their behaviour and move away from products that increase greenhouse gas emissions.
The scheme is just one part of the Liberal government’s overall strategy to tackle climate change.
“You’re making everybody pay a little bit all the time, and so it’s a highly visible policy,” Mertins-Kirkwood said. He noted that Canadians feel the effects of carbon pricing every time they fill up their gas tanks, pay their natural gas bill or go to the grocery store.
“That’s just a recipe for unpopularity, even if it’s not a big price and even if — as is the case in basically the entire country — you get a rebate,” he explained.
“Psychologically, it’s just not a winning equation. I do think that’s an inherent problem with carbon pricing, independent of how it’s been handled politically. It’s not politically a winning policy.”
Poor communications
Indeed, the federal government put a rebates system in place in an effort to help Canadian households offset the carbon price.
In a December report, University of Calgary professors Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter found that Canadian households received quarterly payments through the government’s rebate system “that often exceed the additional expense caused” by the carbon price.
“This means that many families, particularly those with lower incomes, are shielded from the negative financial impact of emissions pricing and some may end up with a net financial gain,” the professors explained.
They also noted that emissions pricing led to only a 0.5-percent increase to the overall rise in consumer prices in Canada since 2019.
“Most of the price increases were driven by global factors, such as surging energy prices and disruptions in supply chains,” they said.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, said part of the problem around carbon pricing is that the government failed to clearly communicate how the system worked, which allowed the Conservatives to “poison the water”.
“The communication answer they had to everything is, ‘Trust us. We’re smart economists.’ It hasn’t been well communicated,” he said.
The money that Canadians got back through the carbon rebate also wasn’t clearly labelled. Funds were deposited into people’s accounts without being marked as part of the policy, fuelling confusion.
But Stewart cautioned not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in the rush to do away with carbon pricing in Canada.
The industrial carbon pricing scheme could still be strengthened, he said, even if the consumer price is cut. “It will do the same job without provoking the same ire.”
He also warned that the Conservative campaign to “axe the tax” belies a more wide-reaching effort by the party to scale back on climate action and boost fossil fuel production.
Canada is home to one of the world’s largest oil deposits, in the western province of Alberta. Poilievre has pushed for new fossil-fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines, and opposed a Liberal proposal to cap pollution by Canada’s oil and gas sector.
“Right now, the Conservatives have proposed eliminating not just the carbon tax but also the clean fuel standard, the electric vehicles mandate,” Stewart added. “That has a much bigger impact than just how they say, ‘axing the tax’.”
Liberals break with policy
Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, said some Canadian politicians have been “scapegoating carbon pricing” as part of an “effort to limit all climate action”.
She also told Al Jazeera that the Conservatives have failed to put forward “any climate plan or constructive proposals” so far.
“The conclusion that I am taking at this point is that Mr Poilievre — when faced with one of the gravest crises that the constituents he’s competing to serve are faced with — is only telling us what he will be doing less of.”
Brouillette said Canadian political parties should be outlining what they plan to do to tackle both climate and economic issues ahead of the next election, which must take place by October 20.
“We are hoping to see these candidates engage in a constructive conversation on what they are putting forward to tackle the affordability and climate crises jointly, rather than engage in a race to the bottom,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Party is set to choose a new leader to replace Trudeau in early March, and the two frontrunners in the race have made scrapping consumer carbon pricing one of their early campaign promises.
Let’s take a new approach to fighting climate change.https://t.co/KRLQbGjigL pic.twitter.com/wFcUETlH6E
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) February 1, 2025
Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the top contender in the race, said last week that he would replace carbon pricing with incentives to “reward people for making greener choices”.
Those choices include “buying a more efficient appliance, driving an electric car or insulating your home”, Carney said. “The truth is, the consumer carbon tax isn’t working. It’s become too distracting and too divisive. That’s why I will cancel it.”
His rival for the leadership post, Chrystia Freeland — Trudeau’s longtime deputy and a former finance minister — also said she plans to cancel the carbon price for Canadians.
“Where people have a consumer-facing price on carbon, they’re saying, ‘You know, we don’t like it,’” she said in a recent interview. “So we have to listen, and at the same time, we do need a strong plan to fight climate change.”
‘Force behaviour change’
Ultimately, Mertins-Kirkwood said the debate over carbon pricing has, in part, served to distract Canadians “from talking about what would actually be effective climate policy”.
He said a more effective measure would be to put government regulations in place to make climate action a requirement, not a suggestion.
Mertins-Kirkwood pointed to the mandated phase-out of coal-fired electricity as one such example, as well as a plan to ban the sale of new vehicles with internal-combustion engines by 2035.
“These are hard regulations. These are hard approaches that force behaviour change, unlike something like carbon pricing or electric-vehicle incentives where you’re incentivising and hoping that people will do that,” he said.
Stewart at Greenpeace also said Canada should be looking to develop “a green industrial strategy” that will create green jobs and lead to better investments.
“We need to change the channel from just, ‘Do you support a carbon tax?’ to, ‘If not a carbon tax, then what?’” he said.