PM should feel heat over heating oil exemption

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/11/2023 (1091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The coming winter looks like it will be an increasingly expensive one for a large number of Canadians already feeling the pains of growing inflation, continued high gas costs, higher interest rates affecting mortgage payment, and of course the weekly grocery bill that continues to eat into our wallets.

That idiom about belt-tightening has become a far-too-real scenario for too many Canadians.

Just last week, Food Banks Canada issued a new report that stated food bank use across the country rose to its highest level since the survey began in 1989.

Nearly two million people used food banks in March of this year alone — and that includes even more employed individuals than ever before.

Here in Brandon, that translated into a surge in demand at Samaritan House, where executive director Barbara McNish told us that the organization has seen 865 new clients since January.

“This year, we’ve distributed 14,107 monthly hampers compared to 12,000 last year,” McNish said.

Very clearly, Canadians are experiencing a painful financial pinch — one that needs to be addressed by our elected officials.

No, the provinces and the feds can’t necessarily force grocery stores to lower the price of beef by a few dollars a pound — not directly, at any rate — but they certainly can ease up on the dollars they take out of our pockets. Unless, of course, you’re a government with a credibility problem and you’re in the market for a little vote buying.

Last week, the Trudeau government announced that Canadians who heat their homes with heating oil will get a three-year reprieve from the federal carbon tax. Interestingly, that particular kind of heating fuel is found almost exclusively in the homes of Atlantic Canada, where the Trudeau Liberals hold a number of seats.

It doesn’t help that one of the Liberals’ own members, Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings, suggested to CTV last weekend that “perhaps they need to elect more Liberals in the Prairies” to have similar conversations to those happening in Atlantic Canada.

But for Western Canada, where homes predominantly use natural gas to heat their homes in winter, there will be no carbon tax reprieve. And while there is some basic logic to the Liberal government’s decision, the appearance it gives is but yet another cold shoulder to the West by Trudeau.

“There will be no more carve-outs coming,” Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told the Globe and Mail on his way into cabinet on Tuesday. Those comments echoed Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who said “we won’t be creating other exemptions to carbon prices.”

Guilbeault told the Globe and Mail that the home heating oil exemption is due to a very particular set of circumstances, and pointed to the fact that the price of home heating oil has climbed three times faster than natural gas, that it’s least efficient, and that it’s more polluting.

To be fair, there is some merit to that argument. As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently pointed out, the federal carbon tax currently costs 12 cents extra per cubic metre of natural gas, 10 cents extra per litre of propane and 17 cents extra per litre of furnace oil. And the average household in Atlantic Canada uses about 1,600 litres of furnace oil per year, meaning that the carbon tax would cost about $272 extra for winter heat.

Even without the extra carbon tax, home heating oil is still far more pricey for Atlantic Canadians than natural gas use here in Western Canada. A CBC report yesterday noted that it can cost “four times more to generate an equivalent amount of heat with oil as it does with natural gas.”

And as per the CBC report, the two provinces that rely most on oil for home heating — namely, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. — are also the provinces with the lowest average weekly earnings in the country. No Canadian should begrudge Atlantic Canadians a carbon tax reprieve, particularly as we go into the winter months and the need for heating oil will steadily climb.

That said, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe wasn’t wrong in calling on the federal government to make all forms of home heating exempt from the carbon tax. And while Moe’s promise to “stop collecting and submitting the carbon tax on natural gas” as of Jan. 1 was dismissed by federal officials as a political stunt, the feds may want to rethink this strategy.

The Trudeau government is only fuelling the fires of Western grievance by using regional exclusion as a partisan cudgel. It has already blinked on its own carbon tax policy on home heating by admitting it’s unaffordable for Atlantic Canadians. There’s a great many western Canadians who could use a little help right now too, and Trudeau has the ability to lessen that financial burden — one that his government imposed.

Trudeau may not have many supporters west of the Manitoba-Ontario border, but he purports to be Canada’s prime minister. He should start acting like it.