A key point is what Canada proposes to do with the revenue from the carbon tax. It's going to be divvied up evenly among Canadians and rebated back to them. So people with low carbon emissions will be better off, they'll get more back from the rebate than they pay in tax. But the high emitters pay more, preferably a lot more. This is the model used by British Columbia for quite a while now, and it has broad support there. Another key point is that a carbon tax directly targets the behaviour we want to eliminate. None of the monkeying around trying to hide it as something else, or setting up weird trading schemes that imply some sort of "right to pollute". Just the simple message that if you dump hazardous waste into the atmosphere, you have to pay, no ifs buts or maybes.