Natural gas bills started arriving at homes in September with a new charge — the Campbell government’s carbon tax.

As many senior citizens and families are discovering across the province, the GST is applied to the carbon tax even though it is not a good or a service.

Since the GST’s inception, the federal government has been taxing taxes. For example, Canadians pay GST on the full pump price of gasoline, including all taxes.

The law states the GST is payable on everything unless it has been excluded by legislation. So guess what? Our politicians never exclude taxes. We pay GST not only on the carbon tax but indeed, all taxes on gasoline and natural gas.

Even if natural gas sales stayed flat, the carbon tax will triple by 2012. As it goes up, so will the amount of GST gas customers fork over to the federal government. By the time the carbon tax reaches $30 per tonne in 2012, the federal government will probably be collecting at least $24 million in GST. If winters are indeed getting colder, as many scientists think, GST revenue could get even higher as families and senior citizens on fixed incomes struggle to heat their homes.

Governments might argue that the carbon tax and the GST we pay on it is a small price to save Mother Earth. But when the wheels fall off the global warming bandwagon — as they surely will in the next few years — how likely is it that the carbon tax will disappear?

When the federal government added 1.5 cents per litre to federal gas tax in 1995, it was a temporary deficit elimination measure. We haven’t had a federal deficit for 10 years but we still pay the deficit elimination tax. Once governments get hooked on these taxes, it’s very difficult to ever get them unhooked. The carbon tax will not be revenue neutral to families, may or may not be revenue neutral for the provincial government, but will certainly prove a cash cow for the federal government.

Smithers Interior News