About 600,000 small businesses will start receiving their long-awaited federal carbon rebates today.
The federal government has promised to return about $2.5 billion collected from small and medium-sized businesses in carbon pricing since 2019.
Initial plans were to return the money annually through various programs to encourage energy-efficiency investments but those mostly failed to materialized.
Small businesses had complained repeatedly they were paying a significant portion of carbon pricing collected by Ottawa but were getting nothing back because 90 per cent of the revenues collected were returned in rebates to households.
Individual businesses will start receiving their rebate today with the amount depending on which province they operate in and how many workers they employ.
The funds were to go out next month but Small Business Minister Rechie Valdez says the payments are being sent now instead.
Valdez said, as examples, a small business with 10 employees in Winnipeg will receive $4,810; a business in Mississauga with 50 employees would receive $20,050 and a medium-sized business in Calgary with 200 employees would receive $118,200.
The rebates affect smaller companies with smaller amounts of emissions that don't trigger the big industrial carbon pricing system. They pay the same carbon price as individuals on things like natural gas for heat and gasoline for fleet vehicles.
Big industrial companies with high amounts of greenhouse gas emissions instead pay the carbon price on a portion of their actual emissions.
