The federal government seems to be saying even less than they know about carbon taxes. Which can’t be easy.
It’s a signature policy they insist will work. But they are exploiting a hard-won reputation for cluelessness on key promises from electoral reform to marijuana legalization to convince us they have no idea how this one would function either.
For instance, on April 30, Finance Minister Bill Morneau flatly refused to tell the Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women whether the government had even done a gender-based analysis on the carbon tax. Or, more precisely, he flatly refused to acknowledge that Conservative MP Michelle Rempel kept asking him that question.
His performance was so patronizingly evasive it would make an ideal satirical “mansplaining” video for workplace sensitivity training; starting with announcing he had to be somewhere important soon, so make it snappy.
And there are really only two possibilities. Either he knew whether they had done the analysis and wasn’t saying, or didn’t know and wasn’t admitting it. Either way it was deeply weird given the hoo-hah this administration has made about GBA.
Plot-spoiler alert: CTV reported that same day that “a recent order paper question found Environment and Climate Change Canada has indeed put carbon pricing to the gender test — and found the impacts differ, depending on the system and how the revenue is used.
For the rest of this column: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-robson-what-do-the-liberals-know-about-carbon-tax-that-they-wont-tell-us