Can Trudeau admit to failed carbon gambit?
Toronto pundits should not be so quick to write off the new Doug Ford-Scott Moe alliance against the federal carbon tax. Yes, they were the only two of the 10 provincial premiers in New Brunswick this week to announce their support for a constitutional challenge to the federal law. And yes constitutional experts are correct in predicting that this legal challenge is not likely to succeed.
But winning in the legal battle does not mean winning the policy war. Obstructionist provincial governments can gum up federal policies whose effective implementation require provincial co-operation. Witness how B.C. Premier John Horgan and his antipipeline allies have succeeded in delaying the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion despite losing 17 consecutive court decisions.
With respect to the carbon tax, the law may be on the side of Ottawa, but time and politics are not. Saskatchewan’s reference to its court of appeal won’t be decided for another nine months. Whoever loses will appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which will take another year or more to be heard and then decided. By then, there will have been a spring election in Alberta and a federal election in the fall.
In Alberta, Conservative leader Jason Kenney is promising to scrap that province’s carbon tax if he wins next year’s election. All current polling suggests that he will. Manitoba has adopted its own version of a carbon tax, but the price it places on CO2 is below the minimum demanded by the federal plan. Premier Pallister has warned that if Ottawa tries to force it higher, “we’ll see you in court.” P.E.I. has adopted a climate change plan with no carbon tax — a policy that clearly does not meet federal regulations. And if anti-tax momentum builds, the Newfoundland and New Brunswick premiers have warned that they are not going to impose a tax on their voters that consumers and businesses in six or seven other provinces are not paying.
With next year’s federal election fast approaching, this is potential nightmare scenario for Trudeau and the Liberals. Do they want to make the ballot-issue a new tax that will make it more expensive for voters to fill up their cars, heat their homes and turn on their lights? Maybe this won’t make any difference in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where the Liberals only have five MPs. But in Ontario — where Doug Ford just won by promising to scrap the tax — the Liberals have 80 MPs seeking reelection. Losing even a quarter of these would jeopardize their 183-seat government, which is only 13 over the 170 minimum required for a majority.
In 2015, many centre-right voters supported Trudeau simply because they were tired of Stephen Harper. But in 2018, they supported Doug Ford because they were tired of skyrocketing electricity and gas prices. If in 2019 Trudeau takes a hardline on bringing back the very carbon tax that Premier Ford has just repealed, he risks losing some of these former supporters.
But the alternative — backing off on the carbon tax — has its own risks. Promising action on climate change was one of the issues that helped Trudeau win in 2015. With the help of the U.S.-financed environmental NGO (ENGO) Leadnow, the Liberals targeted 29 Conservative-held ridings in which their polling indicated that climate change was a priority for voters. Liberal candidates subsequently won 25 of these seats.
But these same centre-left voters that supported Trudeau in 2015 are no longer so happy with him. Many are angry about the federal government’s $4.5-billion bailout of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion in B.C. If Trudeau now backs down on his national carbon tax pledge, many of his 2015 supporters for whom climate action is still a priority may drift off to the NDP in 2019.
Underlying the Liberals’ carbon tax dilemma is the spectacular failure of the Trudeau-Notley “social licence” gambit: their belief that in return for their various carbon reduction policies, climate change ENGOs would acquiesce in Canada’s economic need to build the Kinder Morgan TransMountain expansion. Whatever plausibility this trade-off strategy may have had initially has now been destroyed. The anti-Kinder Morgan forces — the Horgan government, U.S. and Canadian climate ENGOs and B.C. Aboriginal groups — have accelerated their opposition to TransMountain, not backed off.
Nor are they shy about explaining why. When CBC asked Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, why he would not give Trudeau and Notley any credit for Canada’s carbon reduction policies, he stated a simple fact: that at only two per cent of global emissions, what Canada does on the domestic “demand” side to reduce our emissions is too small to make any difference. What will make a difference, McKibben continued, is preventing the further development of the Canadian oil sands — the third largest reserve on the world. “To stop the oil sands, we have to stop all pipelines.”
The failure of his social licence strategy forced Trudeau to rescue the TransMountain expansion with the $4.5-billion purchase of Kinder Morgan Canada. This did not win him many new friends in Alberta or Saskatchewan, but infuriated many of his erstwhile climate change supporters in Ontario and British Columbia. With an election only a year away, the carbon tax issue threatens to push the Liberals even deeper into a political corner with no easy way out.
Ted Morton is an Executive-inResidence at the School of Public Policy and Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. Previously he served as a Minister of Energy and Minister of Finance in the government of Alberta.