there's been talk about what the government should do to respond to the inflationary pressure brought on by increases in oil prices.

i think they should bring back the consumer carbon tax, along with the rebates. 

i'd be set to receive almost $1000 from carbon rebates this year, if it wasn't cancelled, and i'd have spent exactly $0 on buying gas. this rebate was set to rise very quickly over the next five years, which is how the carbon pricing was always supposed to work. that would solve the problem of inflation hurting the poor dramatically better than any other ideas being proposed.

the gst rebate increase is going to be about $100, for me. roughly. that is 10% of what i would have got from the carbon tax rebate. i feel ripped off.

time will demonstrate that cancelling the carbon tax was a major economic and environmental blunder, both from the perspective of government and the perspective of consumers. it is clear that removing the carbon tax had no effect on inflation, as everybody with a brain understood would be the case. consumers are clearly no better off. now, the government is being pressured to send out rebates at smaller amounts, while abandoning the revenue stream the tax generated. the result is that the government has more debt than it would have, and that consumers are paying higher prices, while receiving lower rebates. worse, the incentive to shift consumption habits to less polluting behaviour is gone. everybody is worse off than they would have been because canadians proved they are stupid; we proved we couldn't follow a basic economics argument, we proved we couldn't do basic math and we proved we were easily misled by specious demagoguery that a smart 12 year-old would be able to work through with elementary logic. we proved we're dumb lumberjacks that couldn't follow the plot and could be led along by our retarded noses.

i would strongly support immediately bringing back the carbon tax and the carbon rebates at 2026 amounts as a solution to inflation.