The Green Party's Plan: Tax the Shit Out of Everyone, Spend the Shit Out of It

Green Party leader wants to tax-and-spend Canada into economic oblivian

Yesterday Elizabeth May introduced the Green Party's platform in Toronto, just a day before Prime Minister Stephen Harper released the Conservative Party platform. Also in Toronto.

There must be something comforting about proposing a platform that you know you will never, absolutely ever, have to worry about implementing. Something that breeds an artificial sense of confidence.

May's proposed plan is basically a high-tax spending plan that would literally destroy jobs in one parts of the country to fund pogey in other parts.

Central to the Green Party platform is a $6.5 billion corporate tax hike and a carbon tax. The corporate tax hike would be used to fund $3.5 billion in "green friendly" infrastructure projects, while the carbon tax would be used to fund cuts to Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan contributions.

Which, frankly, is a deeply confusing policy. Simply cutting EI contributions doesn't actually produce any additional funds to pay out to unemployed Canadians -- and there would be unemployed Canadians by the thousands after the carbon tax successfully decimated the energy industries of the country -- nor would it even stopgap the CPP's unfunded liabilities, let alone provide more funds to pay out in pension benefits.

To make the platform even more mind-blogging, the Green Party tax plan would actually put Canadians in the west out of work while funding Canadians in regions wrought with unemployment -- like the Maritimes -- to just stay home.

This is before a carbon tax drives up the cost of everything Canadians consume.

Regardless of what the Green Party may think business should do, business typically isn't in the habit of absorbing the increased costs of its inputs. Those costs get passed along to consumers. Under a carbon tax, this would happen at an economically-crippling rate.

Canadians got this when they overwhelmingly rejected then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion's "Green Shift" in 2008. Apparently May didn't.

Then again, Elizabeth May and the Green Party don't need to worry about ever having to implement this policy. It's basically far-left boilerplate to attract a few extra votes to the party.

This is why, regardless of whether or not May manages to get into the televised leaders' debate, nobody really takes the Green Party seriously.