The case for nixing carbon taxes – by David Black (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2018)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

David Black is the chairman of Black Press Ltd. and founder of Kitimat Clean.

Our country must focus on three vital things: develop more good jobs, because many are disappearing; build new businesses that can be taxed, rather than increase the burden on existing taxpayers; and improve our physical environment while we do this.

One obvious way to achieve this is to encourage “value-add” in the oil industry. Instead of exporting our crude oil to other countries, let’s process it here.

Refineries can be built along British Columbia’s coast employing large numbers of workers in good-paying jobs for decades and generating massive new taxes for our governments. (It is uneconomic to build export refineries in Alberta, which is why there are none there. All export refineries in the world are built on the ocean.)

Up to 85 per cent of a refinery’s annual operating cost is the price of the crude oil and the natural gas that it requires. Because Canada has large, inexpensive reserves of these, two resources consultants say that an export refinery relatively near to the oil fields would be the lowest cost refinery on the entire Pacific Ocean.

If we build it, we can provide a substantial market for B.C. natural gas and help Alberta and Saskatchewan make 20-per-cent more from their bitumen than if it is exported.

For the rest of this column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-the-case-for-nixing-carbon-taxes/