The carbon pricing debate is somehow getting worse

The parliamentary budget officer's analysis of federal carbon pricing is reportedly the subject of a «fight» with the Liberal government that includes allegations of «secret data» being withheld from the public.

So it seems that this conversation — a profoundly important one about how the federal government should respond to an existential crisis — has veered very far off course.

The central problem isn't what was included in the PBO's analysis but what was missing from it. But the current «fight» relates to an error that the PBO quietly acknowledged in April.

The CBC's Robson Fletcher explained the details of that mistake last week. In short, while the office of the PBO published analysis that was purportedly specific to the federal government's fuel levy — commonly referred to as the «carbon tax» — the office accidentally included the federal government's industrial carbon price in its modelling.

The inclusion of the industrial price — a policy the Conservatives have notably declined to condemn — presumably had some impact on the PBO's analysis of the «economic impact» of carbon pricing. But the PBO says it won't release a corrected report until sometime this fall.

In the meantime, the government is aggrieved, the PBO is being defensive and no one — least of all the average voter — is winning.

As written into the Parliament of Canada Act, the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer has a mandate to «support Parliament by providing analysis, including analysis of macro-economic and fiscal policy, for the purposes of raising the quality of parliamentary debate and promoting greater budget transparency and accountability.»

Right now, the quality of this parliamentary debate is getting worse.

The real trouble with the PBO's