One final set of remarks -- I would suggest you read these over before submitting your assignments to Turnitin.

For part a), I hope students have been able to come up with some compelling economic arguments in favour of a modest carbon tax in Canada: there are several.  Note that you are asked to set out the rationale for just _one_ of these.  And you should pick the one that you view to be the strongest (i.e. the most compelling).

Given the compelling argument you have chosen to present in part a), in part b) you should discuss possible problems that may arise.  Rather than skim over five hundred, I would focus on which you consider to be the main one or two (or three), depending on space availability.

Part c) -- why am I asking you to do this part?  The general reason is as follows: economics is an applied social science that depends on human behaviour, and human behaviour is inherently difficult to predict; if we aggregate up to the level of a city or a province or a nation, the behaviour of many humans is especially difficult to predict.  Economic arguments regarding the effects of policy, which you will have been making, typically depend on aspects of the economy we are not certain about (in part because of the unpredictability of human behaviour).  Another way of putting it: we _cannot_ be entirely sure in advance what the effects of a given policy will be.  And one's discussion of policy should therefore reflect that uncertainty.  It forces the policy maker (and the policy commentator) to be humble.

Related to this, in designing policy, we typically need to quantify things (by which I mean `aspects of the economy').  Part c) is intended to encourage you to think about the quantification side of policy making and policy evaluation carefully.

Being a bit more specific, in part c), you should try to say what measurable aspects of the economy
will influence the size of the likely effects of the policy.  As such, part c) is intended to get you to label what the sizes of the main effects will hinge on, and in that way, to be less speculative.

One last overall point: I am not expecting you to _solve_ this very hard problem!  But I do want you to offer an intelligent discussion of the issues -- I am genuinely interested to see what you come up with.