Very disappointed to see the federal NDP backing the climate-denying Conservatives in attacking the carbon tax on natural gas heating.

Canada’s carbon tax is (mostly) revenue neutral - if you’ve average heating needs, you break even. So cutting it on heating is a de-facto subsidy on large, inefficient homes.

Revenue neutral carbon taxes won a Nobel prize in economics. Anybody with alternate ideas on fighting climate change: show me your Nobel prize.

But the modern NDP is left-populist. They want simple, brute-force top-down solutions to problems. They’re big believers in “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Any level of indirection in policy solutions is bad.

If unions didn’t exist today, and Liberals proposed them as a solution for protecting workers, NDP would scream “no, we want direct top-down government workplace inspections, don’t you dare charge me union dues!”

When obviously: do both. Both the econ-based bottom-up program and the top-down legislation.

If the Liberals want to reduce the tax on oil, they could make heating fuels a flat rate per BTU (or gigajoule, we’re metric - 1 BTU is 1055 J, so a GJ is about a million BTUs).

Natural gas (CH₄) is 0.0373 GJ/m³. It’s also carbon priced $0.1239/m³ – this amounts to $3.32 per GJ.

Fun coincidence - there’s about as much energy in an L of fuel oil as in an m³ of CH₄ - 0.0383 GJ/L.

Currently, heating oil CTax is $0.17/L. Pricing it per-GJ would reduce the CTax on a litre of heating oil to about the same as an m³ of CH₄ – $0.127/L CTax.

Obviously pricing per GJoule of fossil-fuel would be a de-facto subsidy on less-efficient heating fuels, but it would mean the incentive is not to upgrade from oil to gas, but to upgrade to zero-emissions forms of heating like heat pumps.

And it would be a 25% discount on heating oil CTax, so rural people on heating oil would no longer feel “punished” by the CTax - they’re paying the same per unit of heat.

Of course, this assumes rural grievance is rational.