Resilient because it's invisible

The decision to eliminate the federal consumer carbon tax was made by Prime Minister Mark Carney on his first day in office. It follows years of attack by the Conservatives. But this whole matter has received relatively little attention in Quebec, where the debate seems rather out-of-synch with the rest of Canada. Normand Mousseau explains why in an opinion piece for Globe and Mail.

In it, we learn that the reason is the discretion, even invisibility, of this tax in the eyes of the Quebec population. In fact, both the levying of the cost of carbon and the redistribution of the revenues from this market take place far from their day-to-day transactions. In fact, a "carbon tax serves only to make the fuel-based solutions ever less competitive with the low-carbon alternatives", without any need "[to draw] attention to the specific mechanisms" at work.

This guarantees "the opacity and therefore, the resilience of the system" by making it "less prone to becoming a political target". A resilience that other emissions mitigation programs could learn from, "especially in a system where climate change deniers represent a significant political force".