The carbon pricing audit was one of five published Tuesday by Jerry DeMarco. He also looked at the government’s plans for transitioning workers away from fossil fuel industries, its hydrogen energy strategy, climate-related infrastructure policies and the government’s efforts to cut its own emissions.
“There’s a question of fairness between the federal large emitters program, the OBPS, as it’s called, and the carbon levy that everyday Canadians pay,” DeMarco said at a news conference. Currently, eight provinces and the Northwest Territories use their own systems and DeMarco said there is little continuity of the price paid by industries across the provinces.
Consumers in provinces using the federal carbon pricing system get rebates from the government so they’re not disadvantaged from paying the carbon price, but because the rebate is standardized based on their family size and isn’t tied to how much fuel they use, they have an incentive to cut their fuel use because they’d get the same rebate and pay less in carbon pricing.
Small businesses that pay the price on input fuels don’t get a rebate but can apply for grants from the government to make their businesses more energy efficient. But DeMarco said very little of the money assigned to that program has flowed to date, leaving small businesses paying the highest carbon price costs with little relief.Article content
In a separate audit, DeMarco said the government is both “unprepared and slow off the mark” responding to the need to help more than 170,000 fossil fuel workers prepare for a transition to a cleaner energy economy.