Still losing the war on climate change all these years later

OTTAWA—Back during the 2008 election campaign, reporters covering Stéphane Dion, the Liberals’ accidental leader at the time, spent many a dreary hour listening to him trying to explain his proposed “Green Shift” to voters. The policy—a price on carbon fuels with the revenues being used to cut income taxes and increase family supports—was the early version of the carbon levy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would introduce 10 years later. Maybe the idea was way ahead of its time, or maybe the vague-sounding Dion was the wrong advocate. Despite the enduring conviction by many that a different leader with a different message could have overcome the not-very-popular Conservatives in that election, Stephen Harper led them to a minority victory in 2008. He argued that Dion’s carbon tax would fan disunity and damage the economy. “It will drive up the price of everything: transportation, groceries, electricity, heating, even propane for our barbecues,” he said. Ignoring the tax breaks that were central to the plan, Harper said the policy would hurt the Canadian middle class while making the cost of living “unbearable” for fixed-income seniors and low-income families. Harper had famously once called the Kyoto Protocol a “socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,” and as prime minister he later withdrew Canada from the international climate accord. Conservatives have been fighting against the use of measures to reduce Canada’s greenhouse emissions ever since. Ignoring the 2016 commitment by most provinces to co-operate with Ottawa on implementing a carbon levy, Ontario kicked off its rejection of that agreement in 2018 when Premier Doug Ford’s newly elected government scrapped the province’s cap-and-trade system with Quebec and California. Eventually, provincial challenges to the constitutionality of the federal carbon levy ended up at the Supreme Court in a case brought by Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan. But in 2021, in a 6-3 decision, the court ruled Trudeau’s carbon levy was constitutional, with Chief Justice Richard Wagner writing that putting a price on pollution “is critical to our response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world.” Nearly three years later, led by premiers who increasingly appear to see their role in the federation as confrontational, the Conservatives have finally found a tactical opening they can readily exploit on this matter. While Canadians have always supported action on climate change, they have been split on whether they were willing to help pay for it. And the likelihood of the carbon tax becoming a potentially game-changing problem for the Liberal government was steadily advanced by Trudeau’s failure—not unlike Dion all those years ago—to effectively explain to Canadians how the carbon levy works: namely that most people get the extra tax they pay on fossil fuels rebated back. New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs is among the premiers who have written to the feds demanding that the carbon tax carve-out be removed from all forms of home heating energy. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade Now, with consumers caught up in an affordability/housing debt crisis, the carbon levy has emerged as a major symbolic liability for the federal Liberals. Despite the overwhelming agreement among economists (and conservatives in the pre-populism days) that a market-based price on carbon is the most effective way to fight climate change, charges by the premiers and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre that fossil fuel taxes are an excessive, punitive burden for consumers that should be eliminated is an easy sell in a cost-of-living emergency. And the Conservatives’ campaign to turn the carbon tax into a hot-button issue with which to clobber the Trudeau government was given new life by Ottawa’s decision to water down environmental policy. By Nov. 10, the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia were calling for a meeting with Trudeau to discuss their demand that the carbon tax carve-out be removed from all forms of home heating energy. Trudeau recognized this for what it is: a continuation of Canadian right-wingers’ largely ideological refusal to recognize climate change or fight it by enforcing a price on pollution. “We put in place the most ambitious plan and actions to fight climate change that any Canadian government has ever seen,” he told the media. “And we've done it at the same time as conservative provincial premiers have been pulling back on the fight against climate change, not stepping up in the fight against climate change.” The issue is emerging as a crossroads for Canada, with the prospect of the single most important tool in Ottawa’s climate efforts at risk of being undercut at a time when the goal of reaching the government’s emissions reduction targets to help avert a global catastrophe looks more challenging than ever. Despite the obvious need to work against climate change as the immense and costly damages from floods and wildfires mount, all indications are that the powerful and increasingly profitable oil and gas sector—with the help of some premiers—is still winning the battle over Canada’s future. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times