Angry in the Great White North

A message directly from Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion.  The Green Shift is so simple:

The Liberal Green Shift plan is as powerful as it is simple: We will cut taxes on those things we all want more of such as income, investment and innovation. And we will shift those taxes to what we all want less of: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste. We need to make polluters pay and put every single penny back into the hands of Canadians.

Simple?

Right.  Here's a new wrinkle that has been ignored by the Liberals:

If the money from a carbon tax is paid back to Canadians through income-tax cuts and credits, Alberta companies and consumers could pay more than 33 per cent of the many billions collected in a carbon tax, but Albertans could be returned just a fraction of that in rebates.

University of Calgary professor David Keith, who consulted with Dion's experts who designed the Green Shift policy, says there's no magic bullet to fix the issue of money draining from Alberta.

"The reality is that if a (Liberal) government is elected, we will just have to start negotiating," he said.

"But the underlying idea is that it wouldn't make any sense and it wouldn't be politically stable or possible to have a huge wealth transfer out of Alberta, so the answer has to be that more of that tax money goes to the Alberta government, or that you adjust the transfer payments to compensate."

[Liberal environment critic David McGuinty] says that Jaccard's notion of returning what is paid out in carbon tax back to each province, dollar for dollar, hasn't been discussed by Liberal policy makers.

Hasn't been discussed?  But this problem totally undermines the principle of the Green Shift.

If you make the Green Shift revenue neutral for citizens, then money will flow out of Alberta (low population) to Ontario and Quebec (high populations).

But if you can't tolerate such a huge shift of wealth out of Alberta, then you have to tilt the money flow so that Alberta citizens enjoy more benefits from the Green Shift than just about anyone else.

How do you explain to people in Ontario and Quebec that the money the government is collecting from them is going to Alberta?

Have we received any explanation of how this will work from the Liberals?  Of course not.  They haven't discussed this.

But they promise they will discuss it if they win the election.  And then they'll decide how it'll work.

Or maybe Canadians will be offered the chance to watch reporters interrupt Stephane Dion when he goes into his "as powerful as simple" shpiel and pin him down on some of these issues.  Maybe it'll force the Liberals to actually discuss them,  Because all this sounds like a recipe for years of regional and provincial divisiveness.