There’s a pivotal moment in the Christmas movie Die Hard when hero John McClane yells out of a shattered window to his fellow cop on the ground: “Welcome to the party, pal!”

Atlantic Canada is about to join a party that’s not as fun as watching Hans Gruber fall from a building: welcome to the Trudeau government’s carbon tax shindig.

Most of the rest of Canada has been paying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandatory minimum carbon tax for years now, both at the gas station and for home heating.

Here’s what folks from Yarmouth to St. John’s can expect next year.

The federal carbon tax will be $65 per tonne on petroleum-based fuels. That means you will pay more for gasoline, diesel, furnace oil, propane and natural gas. If you use kerosene or coal oil in your old Christmas tree farm camp near New Germany, you’ll pay the carbon tax on that, too.

How much?

Gasoline will have a carbon tax of 14 cents per litre and diesel costs will be up 17 cents. Filling up a minivan will cost about $10 extra and it will cost about $16 more to fill a pickup truck.

For diesel, it will cost about $22 extra to fill a heavier-duty diesel pickup truck. Truckers hauling groceries and supplies will pay more as well, as filling the tanks of a big rig diesel will cost about $154 extra thanks to the carbon tax.

A family in Dartmouth that fills up their minivan once a week and their pickup truck twice a month will pay about $77 in carbon taxes a month at the pumps when the federal backstop kicks in next year. 

The carbon tax on home heating is getting cranked up, too. Furnace oil will cost 17 cents extra per litre and propane will be 10 cents more per litre. Natural gas will cost an extra 12 cents per cubic metre. 

The average household in Nova Scotia uses about 1,500 litres of furnace oil per year, so that means the carbon tax will cost an extra $255 for winter heat.  A mid-sized house that uses propane goes through about 2,500 litres per year, so folks in Prince Edward Island who use propane will pay about $250 extra to heat their home.

The Trudeau government seems annoyed that folks are worried about the financial hardship the carbon tax will cause people in Atlantic Canada.

The Trudeau government’s Labour Minister, Seamus O’Regan, is insisting that Atlantic Canadians will be better off with the carbon tax and says he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about concerns of soaring prices.  

The feds often say Canadians will “get more back than they pay” in the carbon tax. 

That claim is patently false. 

The Parliamentary Budget Officer did the arithmetic and found even with the rebates, Canadians are still out money because of the carbon tax. Next year, Ontarians will be about $490 poorer, Albertans will be down $847 and we don’t know how much Atlantic Canadians will be out yet.

The government’s talking points also simply don’t muster up. The objective of the federal carbon tax is to “punish” the behaviour of using petroleum-based fuels. It’s supposed to make gas, diesel and home heating unaffordable. That’s a feature, not a bug. 

To make matters worse, the Trudeau government, supported by the NDP, is imposing a second carbon tax through government regulations this summer. That second carbon tax will add about 10 cents per litre to the cost of gasoline and diesel.

Canadians can’t afford this carbon tax punishment. 

Thanks to the Trudeau government’s carbon tax, the wallets of taxpayers in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island are about to get a whole lot lighter.  

It’s the Trudeau government’s party that most can’t afford, but attendance is mandatory.