We're used to tipping fees for garbage

David Suzuki made a point yesterday on CTV's Question Period that I think is worth re-iterating. All of us are already paying a tax on pollution: the tipping fee that we pay to landfills in order to dump our garbage. For the most part, that tax is built into our overall property tax bill or rent, instead of being a line item, so we just don't see it. But you can see it if you have extra waste and you have to haul it to the waste disposal site yourself. In the City of Kingston, you get your vehicle weighed when you enter and exit the site and you pay $71.23 per tonne of garbage that you leave.

It looks like the new Federal Liberal green tax shift plan may be leaving the tax on gasoline unchanged (the 10 cent federal excise tax) but instead using it as a benchmark to define an equivalent price on CO2 emissions of $42 per tonne, and to apply that benchmark on other forms of fossil fuels. It's hard to argue that a $42/tonne fee for CO2 emissions is so unreasonable compared to the tipping fee ($71.23 for Kingston, Ontario) that we already pay for our garbage.