Stephen Maher: With his base-pleasing attacks on the carbon tax, the Conservative leader is misleading Canadians about the most important issue we face
There are many lines of attack open to Andrew Scheer as he seeks to replace Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister in October.
Scheer can make a pretty good case that it’s time to replace Trudeau with a mild-mannered moderate in touch with the values of suburban moms and dads, the people who, as Stephen Harper used to say, “work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules.” Canadians are among the largest polluters in the world: our per capita emissions are the highest among the top global 10 emitters. Saskatchewan and Alberta are the worst, mostly because the oil there has to be boiled out of tar, which burns a lot of carbon, but also because they produce electricity by burning coal.
But just because a lot of Canadian conservatives think a carbon tax is bad doesn’t mean they are right. They are wrong. It is good policy, likely the best that is politically possible. It is a tax on consumer carbon emissions—$20 a tonne for now, rising to $50 a tonne by 2022—with negotiated levies on big industrial emitters, since there is no point imposing high fees on an Ontario factory if it can just move to some uncivilized place, like Michigan, where there is no price on carbon.
Smug Canada, which thinks of itself as a world leader, is a failure on climate. For decades, under Liberal and Conservative governments, we have promised to cut emissions but failed to do the politically difficult work required. Since 1989, the year the United Nations first warned of the dire consequences of carbon emissions, Canada’s per capita emissions have declined only slightly, from 16.9 to 15.6 tons per person.
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