Taxes don't stay where you put them

What a shock: A tax on producers gets shifted to consumers. The Gazette (via The Misfit) reports

Quebec energy consumers - not just energy producers - are the ones who will end up paying for the province's new green fund. The bills are in the mail.

It wasn't supposed to be this way: When the provincial government imposed the country's first carbon tax last fall, it wanted producers to pay.

But just as oil refiners have already done, Gaz M�tro started passing on the cost of the carbon tax this month.

Even the basic lessons of tax incidence, taught in the first few weeks of ec 10, come as a surprise to some people.