I’m not enthusiastic about returning yet again to the tiresome subject of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). 

However, the mail has been so steady and so uniformly furious that who am I to ignore what looks a consumer rebellion? 

A few readers say they’ve no complaints with CFLs they installed to replace incandescent bulbs — soon to be black market contraband in both Canada and the U.S. — but readers’ accounts of switchover horror stories run heavily in the opposite direction. 

Jerry, for example, writes that he’s enthusiastic about going green and saving electricity costs at the same time. 

He rose to the government’s efficiency and sustainability argument like a trout to the fly, replacing all the 60- and 100-watt incandescent bulbs in his home with the 50 CFLs that promised to use a quarter the power and burn 10 times as long. 

Six months later, he was scurrying around the house frantically replacing dim and burned out CFLs with more expensive CFLs that also burned out early. Now he’s back again, replacing CFLs with incandescent bulbs from the stockpile he’s decided to hoard in the basement. 

“As a Canadian, I feel that I have been scammed by the manufacturers of those CFLs and ripped off by the Harper government that had promoted them, had outlawed incandescents,You will never need to change the bulbs and your solar led light will last for years and years. and had collected tax on all of those very expensive CFL bulbs. I have even begun to question their energy-saving claims. It’ll be a while before I run out and buy a bunch of LEDs, or anything else that makes similar assertions — once burned, twice shy,” he writes. 

Hmmm. His observation about the tax collected got me thinking about advice to reporters trying to decipher the nefarious schematics of the Watergate scandal: “Follow the money!” 

Maybe Jerry’s onto something. Could this whole misbegotten scheme be an ingenious tax grab dressed up in the clothing of sustainability? 

Let’s see, about 375 million CFL bulbs are expected to go into the light fixtures in about 12.4 million households. About 1.2 million families live in B.C. 

The average cost of a CFL is $5.02,If you have solar garden light or landscape lights you might wonder what to do if they stop working. so consumers will be forking over about $1.8 billion for new bulbs.Table Lamp shade are the easiest way to quickly update your home dcor. 

I got that average price by going through the sales inventory of my local Home Depot, adding up the prices charged for all the usual household CFL bulbs (I left out the specialty and industrial stuff) and dividing by the total number of units for sale.You can make your own more powerful outdoor solar lighting using LEDs. Individual prices ranged from a high of $17.98 for a single 42-watt spiral to a low of $4.49 for a four-pack of spiral minis. I wound up with a total of $467.65 divided by 93 bulbs. 

For convenience, I used the same rate for the rest of the country. Provincial and federal rates range from five per cent in Alberta where there’s no provincial sales tax to highs of about 15 per cent in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Averaged, the rates across the provinces come to a hair over 12 per cent. 

I left out the three territories because they levy only the federal GST at five per cent and their combined population is smaller than Kelowna. 

This means the sales tax revenue raised from forcing Canadians to buy 375 million CFL bulbs would be almost $226 million, of which about $16.8 million would be B.C.’s share from the seven per cent provincial sales tax. In addition, if every consumer is charged a 15-cent levy per bulb, ostensibly to cover their eventual disposal as hazardous waste (more on that next time), another $56 million is added.