i'm a poor canadian with an education. you should ask me.
in fact, the carbon tax credit/rebate was extremely useful to me as i spend $0 on gas directly, due to not having a car, and the inflation was mostly not being caused by the carbon tax directly, although the increases in gas prices coming from global instability did lead to increases in fertilizer prices, and that was a major cause of the inflation. some people claim that grocery stores are just being greedy, and there are specific items sold in grocery stores that get insanely marked up for huge profits to compensate, but actual food is practically sold at cost in canada. the factors driving inflation in food (specifically. just food.) are due to production costs, not greed. but if your favourite pre-made chocolate cake at loblaws is 4x as much as it was five years ago, or your brand name detergent is 5x as much, that's how they compensate and pull in these crazy profits.
shifting the carbon tax rebate to the gst refund, without levying a carbon tax in between, will at least make up for that lost income, which very low income canadians will find very helpful. some conservative called it "chump change". well, it's easy to say that when you're not very poor, but that chump change could be the $50 of pasta you need that month. this is responsible in that sense, as it's targeted towards low income groups that need it, should not be inflationary and was, i always argued, the value of the carbon tax in the first place. i never expected that the carbon tax would reduce carbon use. when faced with a high gas bill, canadians will choose to pull their kids out of hockey, or reduce discretionary spending, instead of address the gas bill. there are ways around high energy costs that don't require "innovation", and taxes are never going to "spur innovation", but canadians are so culturally tied to using gas as a way of life that they won't think to do it, even when faced with steep increases in costs. canadians are trained to tighten their belts during down periods in order to pay the bills, and that's what we saw.
in order for the carbon tax to do what it was supposed to do, it would require huge amounts of social conditioning to get people to think differently about their spending decisions. canadians are famously socially liberal and fiscally conservative and trained for that belt-tightening, rather than to innovate or look for ways around high bills. at best, they might try to reduce usage, but that's not the point of the tax. we've had a problem in canada of finding the right policies but refusing to do good implementation because the government constantly argues that the market will figure it out.
no. the. market. won't. figure. it. out.
so, when we rolled out heroin decriminalization, we abandoned the portugese model that it was supposed to be built on and instead brought in this market libertarian pipe dream and watched it blow up in our face. when we increased immigration through the roof, we just flew them in and dumped them on the street, rather than spend to build the integration services, because that's what the market is for. when we brought in a carbon tax, the government avoided talking about it, in the mistaken belief that it would just work, and the market would figure it out, when the government should have been running constant ads everywhere explaining what it was and how to adjust. no, don't pull your kids out of hockey. get a hybrid instead. etc.
for now, this replaces the income subsidy that the very poor had come to rely on in the face of the coincidental brutal inflation because they don't burn gas directly, and which was abruptly taken away from them. that shouldn't have happened; there should have been a plan to transition. but if they're fixing it, great. that takes us back to where we were last year, at least.
as for the cost of groceries, people should make more of their own food, to start. there's a connection between healthy eating and affordable eating. unfortunately, in both canadian and american society, the more wealthy eat better and pay less, and the less wealthy tend to eat worse and pay more. there's a problem of education underlying this, tied into class and tied into lifestyle.
if you want to stick it to loblaws, don't buy that premade cake. buy some produce instead.