Poilievre and Singh don’t like the Liberal climate plan. So what’s theirs?

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
The irony in Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s equating the effect of the carbon tax to an economic “nuclear winter” is its evocation, in the words above of novelist Cormac McCarthy, of the apocalypse.
The apocalypse is, of course, the very thing that the carbon tax is designed to help us avoid. Of course, it is not enough. But it’s proven effective at reducing emissions and helping to keep the worst consequences of climate change at bay. Yet that has gone missing in Poilievre’s “Axe the Tax” slogan, reducing a relatively effective carbon pricing mechanism to an electioneering sound bite.
Bizarrely, creating financial incentives to prod consumers and industry to pollute less by reducing greenhouse gas emissions has led Poilievre and his minions to predict a future of economic destruction, from “mass hunger and malnutrition,” to inflation running rampant to seniors freezing in the cold.
The term “nuclear winter,” let’s remember, was coined in the early ‘80s to forecast the devastating effects of nuclear war between the super-armed powers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Lit by fire, consumed in darkness, the Earth’s surface cooled into a state of mass starvation: the phrase remains chillingly effective.
And absurd in the context of contemporary carbon-tax politics.
Here’s a simple counterpoint: carbon pricing is projected to reduce emissions by as much as 50 per cent by 2030. In tonnage, that means preventing 226 million tonnes of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.
That’s the conclusion of the Canadian Climate Institute. The policy research group found that the consumer carbon price – that is, the fuel charge paid by consumers – accounts for between eight and nine per cent of avoided emissions. Industrial carbon pricing contributes between 23 and 39 per cent of avoided emissions.
Three key points here. The first is that a failure to implement emissions-reducing policies would have resulted in steadily rising carbon output. The second is that full implementation of every carbon pricing policy still leaves Canada short of its 2030 climate goal. And finally, in the conclusion of the climate institute, any “weakening or backtracking on individual policies” could increase that gap. (As this space has pointed out previously, it was a clear mistake on the government’s part to exempt home heating oil from the tax.)
Then what?
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has failed to push effectively past his consumer rebate soundbite (80 per cent of households receive quarterly payments that exceed what they spend in the tax).
The Liberals’ effective use of pricing carbon as a means to help build a globally competitive, clean economy is not getting through.
Nor has enough emphasis been placed on carbon pricing as just one mechanism toward that goal.
Trudeau’s single-minded focus in his communications on the rebate misses that, in this low-trust environment, many will inevitably refuse to believe the carbon levy is anything but a tax grab, notwithstanding the occasional cheques we get. Little wonder, then, that those who have benefitted least from our carbon economy complain about being asked to pay for the transition. Too few understand what the policy does, too many feel they are paying unfairly.
So the Conservatives have seized the tax as a pocketbook issue without offering any credible alternative for reducing fossil fuel consumption and improving energy efficiency.
And the NDP? They’re on the fence. Does Leader Jagmeet Singh support the tax? Seemingly not the Liberal version. He says he doesn’t want the burden of fighting climate change placed on the backs of working people, where, in fact, it isn’t.
We were puzzled by NDP MP Peter Julian this week when he said this to CTV News: “It’s fair to say we haven’t released the plan.”
Is there a plan? Do the Conservatives have a plan? We stand ready to do a cost/benefits analysis. The biggest cost, of course, would be the environmental impact of doing nothing. That would be apocalyptic.