this is a more responsible article (excluding the silly reference to "what economists say", as though economics is a science, as though it analyzes facts, and as though economists all agree with each other), but it's not addressing the point that i've referred to, and that the american economists i referenced yesterday were pointing out, about the importance of taxing imports.
this issue is less pronounced in alberta or bc because the economy isn't reliant on manufacturing. in ontario, manufacturing is the dominant part of the economy - behind only real estate, by gdp. so, let's consider a manufacturing plant in niagara falls that has branches on both sides of the border, for illustrative purposes - it doesn't have to actually exist in the real world, it can just exist in the imaginations of people in ivory towers.
what a carbon tax is going to do is force firms to make one of the four choices when faced with rising costs:
1) pass the costs on, which it will do if it can remain competitive (ie everybody else does it)
2) move production elsewhere, like to the plant across the river
3) innovate a solution to cut costs somehow, as though businesses aren't already faced with incentives to lower costs, and wouldn't already reduce production costs if they knew how, in the first place.
4) downsize somehow.
as (3) is in truth absurd, and (4) is in most cases alarmist and only realistic in situations where a firm is already dying anyways, the real options are between (1) and (2).
now, even if everybody else does (1), (2) remains an incentive, if possible. and, then, once a few firms start doing it, everybody else has to do it in order to compete. so, what you've really done is create an incentive to move manufacturing to the united states.
further, when a consumer walks into a market and looks at the difference in price, they're really not going to be incentivized to buy the less polluting product, at least not so long as imports are not being taxed; what they're going to be incentivized to buy is the product produced in a different country that isn't being taxed, which could very well be, maybe even probably be, the more polluting product.
the way it's designed, it's really just a tariff on ourselves.
now, this isn't happening in a vacuum. there are other factors to consider, including the tariffs that trump is insisting on. the carbon tax may not be powerful enough on it's own, or it might be the breaking point, or it might not make any difference at all. so, there's no guarantee it will cause a recession.
but, it is a recessionary policy.
and, in ontario, there is some potential for some harm from it - if we insist on refusing to tax imports. so long as we allow foreign polluters access to our markets tax-free, it's simply a tariff on ourselves.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/01/23/heres-how-trudeaus-carbon-price-will-actually-affect-the-economy-according-to-economists.html