On Oct. 15, Canadians in all provinces except BC and Quebec received their quarterly carbon rebate cheque. But have you ever wondered how Canada’s carbon rebate system came to be?
The idea isn’t new. It traces back to Peter Barnes’ 2001 book Who Owns the Sky?, where he proposed the "Sky Trust" concept. In this model, permits for carbon emissions are sold, and the revenue is distributed equally among all citizens.
By 2010, Marshall Saunders, founder of Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) USA, became concerned about the faltering cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Congress. He sought advice from two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who were advocating for a carbon fee with rebate system.
Williams and Zabel ultimately drafted a legal summary outlining this policy for CCL. Around Earth Day 2010, while Saunders was lobbying for the policy on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, he encountered renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. Since 2010, Hansen has been a strong advocate for carbon fees with rebates and in 2016 he supported our Parliamentary e-petition for carbon fees with rebates.
In June 2010, I met Marshall Saunders at a climate conference in Nashville, Tennessee. He asked me to join CCL. Recognizing the need for cross border collaboration on climate policies, I said yes. In September 2010, Citizens' Climate Lobby Canada was born.
Groups quickly formed across Canada to build political will for a price on fossil fuel pollution with rebates. In October 2018, after our 13th collective lobbying effort on Parliament Hill, we learned that Canada was about to enact a carbon fee and dividend policy. On Oct. 16, 2018, just before Prime Minister Trudeau announced the policy, then-Senator Grant Mitchell remarked, “You are one of the most successful lobbying groups I have worked with because you are about to get what you lobbied for.”
Since 2010, we have met monthly, educated ourselves, empowered each other and documented our work. Here is a sample of our work between 2010 and 2018:
- Chapters: Expanded from 28 chapters in 70 ridings (2010-2015) to 38 chapters in 100 ridings by 2018.
- Lobbying Efforts: Engaged in 939 lobby meetings with Parliamentarians.
- Media Presence: We appeared in 3,693 newspaper articles, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and editorials supporting carbon fee and dividend, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Lorrie Goldstein at the Toronto Sun and Postmedia’s editorial board.
We initially drew upon the Canadian expertise, including Dr. Shi-Ling Hsu, author of The Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting Past Our Hang-Ups to Effective Climate Policy” (2011), the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada's Ecofiscal Commission, Canadians for Clean Prosperity, and more recently the Canadian Climate Institute. We gathered additional insights from the Stockholm Environmental Institute, Oxfam, Americans for Carbon Dividends, and the REMI Report.
Our instincts that carbon fees with dividends is a superb policy were bolstered; thousands of economists in the USA, Europe and Canada have all endorsed carbon fees with rebates. We acknowledge that other policies are necessary as well, but without pricing pollution from fossil fuels and providing rebates, the cost of averting catastrophic climate impacts will impose a much greater burden for the taxpayer.
The most recent Parliamentary Budget Office report finds that the average household receives even more back from the rebates than they pay in carbon fees but the analysis of the indirect impacts remains flawed. Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail tweeted this about the PBO report, "... Other methods are much costlier and don’t come with a rebate. It’s just that the PBO didn’t bother to include those, which makes this study fairly pointless."
Doing nothing to combat climate change does not mean paying nothing. In fact, it has severe consequences, as illustrated by extreme weather events in Canada this year, including the Jasper wildfire, the hailstorm in Calgary, the floods, and other climate impacts across Canada more than $7 billion in insurable costs and driving up insurance premiums.
To this day, Citizens' Climate Lobby Canada continues to empower, train, and support people across Canada in engaging in civil discourse around evidence-based climate solutions. Why have hundreds of your fellow citizens quietly done this work for you? For the greater good. The world’s energy systems are transforming and it is an economy which our relatively small country is unlikely to capture without a strong price signal like carbon pricing at play.
Find out more about us and how you can get involved here.
Cathy Orlando is the director of programs at Citizens’ Climate International and director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada.
