Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Making BC’s carbon tax revenue neutral again and removing redundant regulations would alleviate economic burdens of the carbon tax
Currently, British Columbia’s carbon tax plan has serious design flaws that unnecessarily harm the economy. This essay makes the case for reforming BC’s existing carbon tax to mitigate its negative economic impacts and to explore potential ways to achieve this goal.
As part of efforts to improve the carbon tax plan, the province should aim to restore revenue neutrality by using carbon tax revenue to reduce broad-based tax rates, such as corporate and personal income taxes. And to enhance cost-effectiveness, the provincial government should prioritize repealing existing GHG-related regulations, mandates, and subsidies, and utilize the carbon tax as a mechanism to replace them.
By implementing a revenue-neutral approach and by repealing redundant GHG regulations and mandates, the provincial government could help alleviate the economic burdens associated with the current carbon tax.
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Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of GuelphRoss R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. Heis the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).… Read more -
Elmira Aliakbari
Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute
Elmira Aliakbari is Director of the Centre for Natural Resource Studies at the Fraser Institute. She received a Ph.D. in Economicsfrom the University of Guelph, and M.A. and B.S. degrees in Economics, both from the University of Tehran in Iran. She has studied public policy involving energy and the environment for nearly eight years. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Ms. Aliakbari was Director of Research, Energy, Ecology and Prosperity with the Frontier Center for Public Policy. She has presented her work at many academic conferences and has been published in the prestigious academic journal Energy Economics. Ms. Aliakbari’s research has been discussed in prominent media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, and her commentaries have appeared in major Canadian and American newspapers such as the Globe and Mail, Washington Times, National Post, and Financial Post.… Read more