UCP candidate claims carbon tax costs Alberta church 50k, later corrects herself saying only 5k

In a tweet sent out Sunday, United Conservative Party candidate for Brooks-Medicine Hat, Michaela Glasgo, claimed that the church she attended that day was going to be paying $50,000 in carbon taxes “this year alone.”

In a follow up tweet, Glasgo pointed out that “The Carbon Tax doesn’t discriminate”, saying that Premiers Rachel Notley’s “failed social license experiment” hurts seniors facilities, small businesses, and even churches.

However, people on Twitter were quick to criticize Glasago’s claim, saying it was impossible for a church to rack up that big of a carbon tax bill in just one year.

Running the math on Glasgo’s claim, we can see that a bill of this size doesn’t make sense. The average urban household in Alberta uses 120 gigajoules of natural gas per year. While a large church would understandably use much more natural gas than the average house, to incur a $50,000 carbon tax bill, the church would have to use 32,960 gigajoules per year, the equivalent usage of 275 average houses.

Glasgo, in response to the criticism she received on Twitter, released a statement on her Facebook page earlier today, reaffirming that the church had indeed asked for a collection to help pay its $50,000 carbon tax bill.

While declining to name the church (to protect its privacy) or show any evidence of the big bill, Glasgo instead reiterated her broader point of the carbon tax making life more expensive for everyone.

In her statement, she cited examples like the City of Medicine Hat budgeting $4.5 million for “carbon tax costs”, the Calgary Board of Education paying out $3.3 million in “carbon tax fees”, and a Sundre Seniors being “forced to consider closing their doors because of the carbon tax.”

Glasgo then went on to write about how the Premier has failed to produce any evidence showing that the carbon tax has lowered Alberta’s emissions.

Ending off her statement, Glasgo said people could “mock her if they liked” but that she was “proud to be running for a party that has made Bill #1 of a future United Conservative Government the ‘Carbon Tax Repeal Act.’”

While no specific evidence has yet to surface backing Glasgo’s claim, this did not stop UCP leader Jason Kenney from retweeting Glasgo’s first tweet saying “We hear stories like this all the time, sadly.”

The Post Millennial reached out to the UCP communications office for a further statement on this matter but, at the time of writing, no response had been received.

However, this afternoon, Glasgo released an update to her earlier statement saying she had spoken with her church and that while the operational costs of the church would be rising by $50,000 in 2019, the carbon tax would only make up $5,400 of that.

Saying she reported original number "in good faith", Glasgo said she "did not intend to mislead" and still fully stands by her "criticism of the NDP’s carbon tax."