As a new paper from University of Calgary economists Trevor Tombe and Jennifer Winter shows, Canada’s carbon tax has added a grand total of 0.5 per cent to food prices. As Tombe noted in a long thread on social media, “that’s a tiny fraction of the 26 per cent rise in food prices in Canada over the past five years.”

This is important and useful academic research. It also comes limping along about three years too late to really matter in the grander scheme of things. Canadians are increasingly opposed to the carbon tax, and increasingly willing to blame it for the increase in food prices that has rocked households and economies across the developed world.

That’s largely a function of the Conservative Party of Canada’s aggressive campaign to paint the carbon tax as the source of all of Canada’s problems — and, by extension, their victory in the next election as the natural solution to them. There is no carbon tax correlation too spurious for the Conservatives to draw here, whether it’s rising food bank usage or declining per-capita economic prosperity.