Canada

The whole point with a carbon tax and rebate is that it doesn't come with all the administration and inefficiencies of picking and choosing things to subsidize and things to penalize. As soon as you start exempting this and that, you blow that out of the water.

The correct response is increasing the rebate to rural households, who statistically, rely more on oil heating, or increase the rebate across the board temporarily.

All this does is take away a very solid incentive for people who are currently looking at upgrading their home heating to chose a lower carbon option. It's also not fair to people who recently did upgrade their heating systems, based on the expected costs.

Exactly my thoughts, it'll only be effective if it's done properly. Otherwise it's just another half-measure that is more burden than benefit.

That said though, I wonder how much carbon/money rural heating oil specifically generated. It's possible this is just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme and is an acceptable loss to help these folks out. Although I might prefer a bigger push to get people off heating oil altogether (which is where it's going to have to go eventually).