MEDIA RELEASE: How Citizens’ Climate Lobby Helped Shape Canada’s Carbon Rebate System

How Citizens’ Climate Lobby Helped Shape Canada’s Carbon Rebate System

For Immediate Release: October 13, 2024
Media Contact: Cathy Orlando, 705-929-4043 cathy@citizensclimate.org

SUDBURY ON in Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory: On October 15, Canadians in all provinces except BC and Quebec, will receive their quarterly carbon rebate cheque or deposit. But have you ever wondered how Canada’s carbon rebate system came to be?

The idea isn’t new. It traces back to Peter Barnes’ 2001 book Who Owns the Sky?, where he proposed the “Sky Trust” concept. In this model, permits for carbon emissions are sold, and the revenue is distributed equally among all citizens.

By 2010, Marshall Saunders, founder of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) USA, became concerned about the faltering cap-and-trade bill in Congress. He sought advice from two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who were advocating for a carbon fee with rebate system. Williams and Zabel ultimately drafted a legal summary outlining this policy for CCL.

On Earth Day 2010, while Saunders was lobbying for the carbon fees with rebates on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, he serendipitously bumped into renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. Since that fateful meeting, Hansen has been a strong advocate for carbon fees with rebates and in 2016 he supported the Canadian Parliamentary e-petition for carbon fees with rebates.

In June 2010, Cathy Orlando, our national director, met Marshall Saunders at a climate conference in Nashville, Tennessee. He asked her to join CCL. Recognizing the need for cross border collaboration on climate policies, she said yes. In September 2010, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada was born with first chapter opening up in Sudbury Ontario. Since 2010 we have met monthly, educated ourselves, empowered each other and documented everything.

Here is some of what we achieved between 2010-2018:
– Chapters: Expanded from 28 chapters in 70 ridings (2010-2015) to 38 chapters in 100 ridings by 2018.
– Lobbying Efforts: Engaged in 939 lobbying meetings with Parliamentarians.
– Media Presence:  Appeared in 3,693 newspaper articles, letters to the editor, opinion pieces and editorials supporting carbon fee and dividend, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Lorrie Goldstein at the Toronto Sun and Postmedia’s editorial board.

In October 2018, after our 13th collective lobbying effort on Parliament Hill, we learned that Canada was about to enact a carbon fee and dividend policy. On October 16, 2018, a few days before Prime Minister Trudeau announced that it would no longer be free to pollute in Canada, then-Senator Grant Mitchell remarked, “You are one of the most successful lobbying groups I have worked with because you are about to get what you lobbied for.”

We initially drew upon the Canadian expertise including Dr. Shi-Ling Hsu, the author of The Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting Past Our Hang-Ups to Effective Climate Policy (2011), the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, Canadians for Clean Prosperity, and more recently the Canadian Climate Institute. We gathered additional insights from the Stockholm Environmental Institute, Oxfam, Americans for Carbon Dividends, and the REMI Report.

Our instincts that carbon fees with dividends is a superb policy were bolstered; thousands of economists in the USA, Europe and Canada have all endorsed carbon fees with rebates. We acknowledge that other policies are necessary as well, but without pricing pollution from fossil fuels and providing rebates, the cost of averting catastrophic climate impacts will impose a much greater burden for the taxpayer.

The most recent Parliamentary Budget Office report finds that the average household receives even more back from the rebates than they pay in carbon fees but the analysis of the indirect impacts remains flawed. Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail tweeted this about the PBO report, “… Other methods are much costlier and don’t come with a rebate. It’s just that the PBO didn’t bother to include those, which makes this study fairly pointless.”

Doing nothing to combat climate change does not mean paying nothing. In fact, it has severe consequences, as illustrated by extreme weather events in Canada this year including the Jasper wildfire, the hailstorm in Calgary, the floods, and other climate impacts across Canada over seven billion dollars in insurable damages and thus driving up insurance premiums.

To this day, Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada continues to empower, train, and support people across Canada in engaging in civil discourse around evidence-based climate solutions.

Why have hundreds of your fellow citizens quietly done this work for you? They do this the greater good. The world’s energy systems are transforming and it is an economy which our relatively small country is unlikely to capture without a strong price signal like carbon pricing at play.

Find out more about us and how you can get involved here: https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/

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