After my op/ed on rural British Columbians’ concerns over the carbon tax, B.C. Environment Minister Terry Lake shot out this letter to the editor:

Jordan Bateman and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's most recent anti-carbon tax column - northern B.C. has no love for the carbon tax, Oct. 12 - misses some key facts and lacks context.

What Bateman and the CTF fail to recognize is what forward-looking tax policy experts know: B.C.'s revenue-neutral carbon tax is innovative in taxing emissions (something we don't want) rather than taxing income (something we do want) and incents more environmentally responsible choices.

Every dollar it generates is returned to British Columbians through reductions in other taxes.

Finally, eliminating the carbon tax would put a $1-billion hole in our budget. That would mean reductions in health care, education and public-safety services - core government programs British Columbians deserve to have protected.

Terry Lake, environment minister 

Actually, Minister, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has been very clear on our carbon tax stand: we say repeal it—along with the revenue neutrality tax credits. So it won’t “put a billion dollar hole in [the B.C.] budget.” Indeed the only one of those tax credits we have suggested keeping (if possible within the context of a balanced budget) is the $228-million personal income tax cut. When the B.C. Liberal government introduced the carbon tax, British Columbians got back 37% of the revenue in that personal income tax cut; last year it was 19%. We are sliding backwards.

Interesting omissions from your letter: nothing to allay the real concerns of non-Lower Mainland British Columbians on the tax, which was the focus of the op/ed. Nothing to soothe the farmer who has to plant 15 acres of food crop just to pay his carbon tax. Nothing to address legitimate and documented economic competitiveness concerns.

Nothing on the Pembina push to septuple the carbon tax, which add another 40 cents per litre to our gas taxes—already the highest in North America at 49 cents per litre.

Nothing on the fact that gas and diesel sales in B.C. were up 9 per cent from 2008 to 2011.

And nothing on the fact that B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped half of what Canada’s overall GHG emission dropped from 2007 to 2010.

The Minister would be well-advised to at least read the last five words of the piece: “The carbon tax must go.”