Joe Warmington

The polluters can still pollute as long as they buy more carbon credits.

And if you are a company that does not pollute, you can profit by selling your unused carbon credits through a government-run auction to those who do.

How does this stop industrial carbon dioxide emissions linked to climate change?

We may need David Copperfield to help explain it to the average person, who puts out their stupid green, blue and brown box of waste every week, knowing it’s not making a bit of difference to our environmental footprint

Now comes a new cap-and-trade dog and pony show that Premier Kathleen Wynne says will see the cost of a litre of gas go up about 4.3 cents and add $5 a month to your natural gas bill.

“The cost of doing nothing is much, much higher than the cost of going forward and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she told reporters.

This is right up there with her death taxes, looming new taxes on wine and selling dope in the LCBO, or, coming up soon, an Ontario pension plan that will take hundreds of dollars out of people’s pay every year.

The whole place these days, meaning Queen’s Park, is Alice in Wonderland.

“She has misguided priorities,” mused businessman and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary Wednesday in commenting about Wynne. “How does this create a single job in Ontario?”

What it does create is more expense to live day to day, as companies will just pass the costs of carbon pricing along to an already beat-up taxpayer.

As Gasbuddy.com’s Dan McTeague explains, “Using today’s prices at the pumps of an average of 89.9 cents, Ontario already gets 21.05 cents on every litre you buy.”

That will now go to 25 cents and the federal government also takes about 14 cents per litre. So on a typical 55-litre fill up, government takes $15.95.

Of course Wynne’s cap-and-trade plan is just a new tax.

We need to call it for what it really is.

Lorrie Goldstein, who knows this stuff like no one else, explains government will for the first time tax people and businesses for their industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Translation? For their basic, day-to-day living.

“Whether it’s a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, the simple fact is that they are both designed to impose new costs on consumers,” said Aaron Wudrick, Canadian Taxpayer Federation national director. “Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are both bad, but cap-and-trade is the worse of the two because it’s so easily influenced by picking winners and losers. By giving more credits or exemptions to big polluters, you defeat the whole purpose of such a scheme.”

So why go through with it?

“The government gets more revenue so they’re happy about that, there is more for them to spend,” Wudrick said. “Overlooked is the fact that a lot of people can’t afford any more taxes.”

To add insult to injury, Ontario’s towns and cities are clinging to the remnants of what was a manufacturing province that has seen all of those jobs go to China, India and Mexico. They didn’t follow Premier Wynne’s pipe dream.

“Lost in all of this is the fact that Canada as a whole accounts for less than 2% of all carbon emissions worldwide,” lawyer Wudrick tells me. “We could literally get our carbon emissions down to zero and still have zero impact on climate change because countries like the U.S., China, India, Russia and Brazil are so much bigger.”

What a phony waste of time and our money.

“We could end up making a huge sacrifice for next to nothing,” Wudrick said. “The bottom line is, even if we literally end all our carbon emissions, it won’t make one iota of a difference in the grand scheme.”

And the polluters will still pollute and the government will get more revenue from us when they do.

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