Historical Legacies and Policy Reform: Diverse Regional Reactions to British Columbia’s Carbon Tax
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines reactions to the carbon tax implemented by the government of British Columbia in 2008. We contrast the vocal opposition that emerged from Northern communities with the quiescent reaction of commuter suburbs in the Lower Mainland. This contrast is particularly noteworthy since it is Lower Mainland commuters, rather than residents of northern BC, who pay the most under the provincial carbon tax. In an effort to understand these paradoxical reactions to the tax, we compare the explanatory power of three theoretical approaches, and find that a full explanation requires elements of all three. The logic of collective action accounts for voters’ misunderstanding of and thus opposition to the tax province-wide, but it cannot explain the emergence of distinct opposition in Northern communities. Electoral incentives can account for politicians’ efforts to represent the latent interests of their constituents, but self-interest alone does not explain the strength of reaction in the North given strong voter disapproval of the tax throughout the province. Rather, a longstanding sense of alienation, quite unrelated to the particulars of the carbon tax, played out in perceptions of the tax as unfair to Northerners, all evidence to the contrary. We conclude with lessons for carbon taxation in other jurisdictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".