PM’s climate pitch: We care, but those other guys don’t

After several days of studying the reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax for provinces that don’t want a carbon tax, the case in favour seems to go like this: it’s not much, and it probably won’t accomplish a lot; it’s complicated and badly structured; it adds another burden on small-business enterprises already stuck with umpteen nitpicky federal and provincial rules hampering their efforts to make a living; and Canada isn’t really all that big a problem as emissions go. But what the heck. At least if we do this we can say, “hey, we’re trying,” and maybe stop arguing about it for a while. And besides, what’s the alternative?

Of this mishmash of wellmeaning rationalizations, I suspect the last is the key ingredient for those people who aren’t particularly impressed with the plan the Liberals have come up with after three years of thinking about it, and with an election approaching, but who want to support it anyway. We’ve got to do something, right? Because … well, we’ve just got to. It’s expected. And because every politician in the universe, pretty near, has more or less conceded that sure, OK, something’s going on with the climate, even if we’re not entirely sure we know what it is and why, but, fine, we should do something about it. It’s better than nothing. Nothing is bad, something is good, so something wins.

That’s going to be a lot to get into the Liberal platform, so I suspect they’ll find a way to condense it a bit. Into something like: “We care, those other guys don’t.” That works better with the prime minister’s greatest strength, which is projecting sincerity. Trudeau sells best when he’s being earnest. Cute works well too, in limited doses, but sincerity is what pushed him past Stephen Harper.

Liberals evidently believe Canadians retain enough trust in government to take effective action against climate change to make Trudeau’s plan a winner, which in politics means it will attract more votes than it will drive away. Presumably his top strategists have advised him as such, and polling confirms their advice. It might not be wise to take either factor as a slam dunk, however: people often tell pollsters what they think they’re supposed to say, or what they feel will reflect positively on them, rather than what their gut dictates. This is particularly true when it comes to the environment, where everybody wants to do the right thing, and also drive a great honking SUV the six blocks to school to pick up the kids. Putting too much faith in Trudeau’s top aides might not be the best idea either, considering they’ve guided him to enough previous howlers, or stood by while he strode confidently into howler ville, to put their guru status in question. Think of his trip to India, or the effort to lay blame on Vice-Admiral Mark Norman for the government’s botched handling of a $668-million supply ship project, or the belief that portraying doctors and small-business operators as greedy plutocrats was a good way to win public favour for a new tax plan.

Two of the biggest provinces, Quebec and British Columbia, already have carbon plans. Four — from Ontario west to Alberta — are opposed to the federal plan. More than 60 per cent of voters live in a province (Quebec) that is happy with what it has, or another (Ontario) that just elected a government loudly committed to opposing carbon taxation in any form. That leaves the four Atlantic provinces, which aren’t essential to victory for any party, but could take on an outsized importance should the rest of the country fail to rise in excitement over the new Liberal approach to reducing their paycheques. The Liberals swept the Maritimes in 2015; they may have to do so again, given the potential for slippage elsewhere.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has yet to say what he’d offer as an alternative, and been criticized for it. It’s assumed he has to release a plan of his own at some point, but that, too, may be the sort of conclusion that’s taken for granted in Ottawa, yet fails to travel far beyond the environs of the capital. During Ontario’s recent provincial vote it was considered similarly obvious that Doug Ford would need to present detailed proposals for the government he eventually formed. Except he didn’t. He just kept promising he’d do a better job than the tired old Liberals, and people were satisfied.

The closest Scheer has come to outlining a climate strategy is to suggest it’s not an issue for Canada to solve. “Even if Canada stopped everything tomorrow, and the other countries didn’t have any solutions, it wouldn’t make a big difference,” he said in a recent CBC interview.

He happens to be right in that, though it annoys activists no end to hear it. Their belief is that every country should do its share, if only as a reflection of good citizenship. There’s an argument to be made for that, too. For Scheer, the situation may come down to a calculation between Canadians’ devotion to civic responsibility and the weight they put on the daily struggle. A plan that raises money for social spending without meeting emissions goals is simply a revenue tool disguised as a carbon policy, he notes.

“There’s no correlation between the reduction of emissions and what the Liberals are proposing,” he said. “Don’t tell Canadians that you’ve got an environmental plan that is really just a new taxation tool.”

Again, it comes down to a matter of trust. If voters don’t believe the Liberals will do much to solve the emissions problem, that they’ll gobble up the tax money while still falling far short of their own targets, voters may decide that doing nothing is bad, but doing something that doesn’t work — while costing jobs and raising taxes — is worse.

A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN THAT IS REALLY JUST A NEW TAXATION TOOL.