Don’t bet on carbon tax deciding vote
Are Conservatives right to think the next federal election will be a referendum on carbon pricing? And are they likely to win if it is?
There they all are on that now-notorious Maclean’s cover: the premiers of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, together with the Conservative leader and presumptive next premier of Alberta and the federal Conservative leader, all butch poses and steely looks, as if to say to any carbon tax that should cross their path: no pasaran!
More than pretty faces, these are men of action. Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and Ontario’s Doug Ford are challenging the federal carbon tax in court. Ontario has cancelled the previous Liberal government’s nascent system of emissions trading, a form of carbon pricing. Manitoba ditched its own carbon tax, after the prime minister appeared to patronize Brian Pallister at a joint press conference.
But the real test, of course, is yet to come. The provinces cannot stop the tax on their own. The court challenges are likely to fail. Provinces that refuse to implement carbon pricing will simply find the federal “backstop” tax imposed in its place. It is the election that will decide the issue, not duelling governments. Or so Conservatives hope.
Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck.
What seems clear is that voters’ support for carbon pricing is shallow and tentative. The Conservative strategist who chortled to the National Post that the Liberals are asking Canadians “to vote with their hearts, not their wallets” — an impossibility, he meant — was correctly cynical. Just because people want to save the planet doesn’t mean they want to pay for it.
The best way to read the public’s mood is in the positions of the political parties, who are in their various ways each trying to assure them that it won’t cost them a dime. The Liberal version of this is to promise to rebate the extra cost of the federal tax to consumers — indeed, they pledge, 70 per cent of households will make a profit on the exchange.
The Conservatives have been less forthcoming, but it would appear their plan is to hide the cost, substituting regulations, whose effects are largely invisible to consumers, for the all-too-visible tax at the pump. Here, too, I suspect they may have a better (i.e. more cynical) read on popular opinion. The public often prefer to have the costs of government hidden from them, even if they know they are paying them — even if they know they are paying more this way, as indeed they are in this case. Do what you want to us, they seem to say, just don’t rub our faces in it.
So I would be skeptical about polls showing majority support for the federal plan: 54 per cent, according to Angus Reid, while Abacus finds 75 per cent would either support or at least accept it (versus 24 per cent opposed). These were taken shortly after the announcement of the federal rebates. Yet it is far from evident the rebates will still register with people a year from now. Indeed, the Conservatives barely paused to acknowledge them as inadequate before going on to pretend they had never been mentioned.
At the same time, it is unclear how much the carbon tax will weigh in people’s votes. While the issue provokes both strong support and strong opposition among certain sections of the public, most do not have particularly strong views on it one way or the other. Just seven per cent of respondents told Abacus it was their number one issue.
Where, exactly, would the Battle of Carbon Hill be fought? Opposition to the tax is unlikely to deliver many more seats for the Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan: they already have most of them. Neither is support for it likely to win the Liberals many more seats in Quebec, Atlantic Canada or even B.C. — not after their purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline.
Where it may prove decisive is in Ontario, and in the commuter belts around the country’s major cities. Even leaving aside the rebates, the costs of a carbon tax are not likely to prove onerous to these voters, at least as of 2019: at $20 a tonne, it would add just 4.4 cents to a litre of gas. But the symbolism might, if it can be portrayed as an attack on their kind — much as the ill-fated reforms to the taxation of private corporations was painted as an attack on small businesses. The desire for respect moves many more votes than pocketbook issues ever will.
Still, one can’t be sure. The issues that decide elections are often not the ones that were predicted to in advance. Election after election, people dutifully tell pollsters that health care is their biggest issue. Yet it almost never proves decisive. Why? Partly because people are skeptical that anybody has any magic bullet solution to medicare’s woes. And partly because the parties, seeing the issue coming a mile away, do their best to neutralize it: rather than polarize opinion with sharply different approaches, they end up hugging as close to each other as they can, to minimize any risk. You are unlikely to win an election on health care, but you can certainly lose one.
Something like the same may result from the great carbon tax fight. After all the shouting is done, the public may well take away largely the same message from every party: they all promise to do something about climate change, and they all promise it won’t cost anyone a thing.