The past several years have seen an ongoing dispute in the media about the economic impacts of British Columbia's carbon tax, which was brought into force on July 1, 2008. The liberal media such as the Washington Post and the Globe and Mail, along with a number of activist websites and smaller press outlets, have avoided directly looking at the issue, have made erroneous claims about the source data, or have attempted to spin the results as a "no economic harm" narrative. Statistics Canada has released the latest Canadian GDP numbers for 2014, which gives us another year to add to the series. While it is true that over the composite period from 2008 through 2014, the BC economy (in terms of both total and per capita [pc] GDP) has not generally underperformed the Canadian average, the key for deciphering the carbon tax impact is to look at the trends before and after the tax came into effect. In the years before BC brought in its carbon tax, both real GDP...(Read Full Post)