Brown’s battle to sell carbon play to Tories
You know who liked the environment? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are very keen to have you realize.
Or, rather, they’re keen to have reluctant Progressive Conservatives realize, as those habitual Tories try to figure out what to do with a leader who wants to fight climate change by making greenhouse-gas emitters pay.
Those loyalists were stunned when leader Patrick Brown announced his support in a major Ottawa speech for using carbon permits to battle climate change. His own MPPs didn’t see it coming, let alone the rank and file. Brown had opposed carbon pricing when he ran for the leadership less than a year ago.
Former leader Tim Hudak gritted his teeth and said Brown is doing the wrong thing but can pursue the policy he thinks is right. Tory legislators had to scramble to amend or remove declarations, even petitions, on their websites condemning the very idea as a commie plot. No, no, no, they said, we just meant we’re against carbon-permit trading the way Premier Kathleen Wynne plans to do it. Sorry, was that not clear?
Now Brown is trying to convince his own people he isn’t a plant from the Liberals or the United Nations or some other shadowy fraternity of freedom-haters.
The party’s out with a video, starring firmly conservative MPP Monte McNaughton, its critic for economic development and jobs, at that. He explains that really, this has all been a terrible misunderstanding.
“We’ve let others frame us as if there’s a contradiction between caring about the environment and being a conservative,” McNaughton says in the video.
Yeah, no, you guys did that to yourselves.
Ontario’s Tories have a baby version of the problem that besets the Republican Party now in the United States: that party’s bosses have spent a couple of decades convincing their members that Washington is irreparably broken, politicians are crooks and book-learning is for weenies. Now they have Donald Trump stealing the party away from them with their own arguments.
Here, the Progressive Conservatives have spent years denigrating environmentalism in principle and frets about climate change in particular. If you’re a politician, even trying to take on climate change disqualifies you from a lot of conservatives’ support now because that’s exactly how the Tories wanted it. But refusing to take on climate change disqualifies you in the minds of a lot of other voters. Which it should, because it’s aggressively stupid.
The party video is a history lesson for conservatives accustomed to crossing themselves whenever anybody mentions Reagan or Thatcher. It troops out clips of them both, talking about environmental protection as a common-sense idea for everyone, not a liberal or conservative notion. It even includes a clip of Stephen Harper urging action on climate change, back when he pretended he thought it was important.
That’s the giveaway that the video isn’t intended for swing voters. If you’re put off by conservatives, showing you Harper won’t likely turn you on to them just yet.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president, made “conservation” a thing the U. S. federal government cared about. Roosevelt enjoyed shooting animals, but recognized for there to be animals to shoot, not all of them could be shootable at all times in all places. He protected hundreds of millions of acres of public land, created wildlife refuges, established the U. S. Forest Service and laid the groundwork for America’s national parks system.
John A. Macdonald created the first national park in Canada, at Banff, Alta. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. More recently, Brian Mulroney and Reagan went after acid rain. Mulroney won awards for his environmental agenda. As British prime minister, Thatcher spoke about the environment in terms that would make her a leftist today ( though she drifted from that later). Reagan’s administration used a cap- and- trade system to phase out leaded gasoline. So Brown has a point here. Wynne and the Liberals gleefully portrayed him as a flip- flopper, a guy you can’t trust. You’d think they’d welcome his finally having seen the problem their way, but that would be noble and this is politics: where there’s dissent on the other team, you do what you can to deepen it.
The trick for Brown over the next couple of years is attracting more moderate voters without making habitual Tories give up on him. This is what that challenge looks like.