Carbon tax deplorables

We haven’t seen much of former U.S. president Barack Obama since he departed the job on Jan. 20. He was spotted in New York City on Friday looking relaxed as he caught a Broadway show with his daughter. Before that, the ex-president was photographed cavorting with Richard Branson on the billionaire’s private Caribbean luxury resort island. If Obama’s conscience troubles him over whatever responsibility he bears for ushering in the turbulent, truculent Trump phenomenon, it doesn’t show.

But whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, it’s undeniable the current president is largely a response, a backlash even, to the excesses of Obama’s leadership, his determination to force through Democrat pet policies — Obamacare, climate regulations, the Iran deal — in spite of voter disapproval and, often, their hostility. When politicians are certain their cause is righteous, they can rationalize away accounting for the will of the people. But in democracies, the people eventually get their revenge. In the U.S. that vengeance looked like Donald Trump.

What it will look like in Canada we might soon find out, as tempers rise against unresponsive rulers in two powerful provinces, and possibly elsewhere. The picture in Alberta is particularly grim. As a new poll from Mainstreet Research for Postmedia confirms, the Alberta NDP is on an entirely different planet than the rest of the province on some of its biggest, most impactful policies.

It’s hard to overstate how unwelcome the NDP’s climate policies have been in Alberta, although it wasn’t hard to predict that imposing a carbon tax in a province built on carbon came off as particularly belligerent. Premier Rachel Notley hadn’t said a word about it in campaigning for election, but afterward claimed that in town halls she’d heard people “wanted a government that was going to take action” on emissions. Of course, such town halls are notorious for representing no actual towns, but rather a self-selected group of highly motivated policy activists. Everywhere else, regular Albertans wanted nothing of the sort.

Now, a month after the carbon tax kicked in, nearly two-thirds of Albertans oppose it, despite Mainstreet’s poll question reminding them it was “aimed at … gaining social licence across Canada for new pipeline projects.” It also mentioned that “full rebates will go to an estimated 60 per cent of Albertans” and “two-thirds of Albertans will receive at least a partial rebate.”

That is absolutely untrue by the way, although it does conveniently echo the government’s spin. As University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe calculated, only one-third of Albertans will get a rebate. Had survey respondents been told that harsher truth, opposition might easily have registered even higher.

As it is, the antipathy to the carbon tax cuts across all demographics: old, young, male, female. You thought millennials had all been indoctrinated in decarbonization? In Alberta, those aged 18-34 — many now likely getting some of those rebate cheques — are among the unhappiest, with 64 per cent against the carbon tax, compared to 35-to-49 year olds at 61 per cent and seniors at 62 per cent. Opposition to Notley’s hard cap on oilsands emissions, meant to limit future growth in the resource, is fierce, too: 54 per cent oppose it; just 31 per cent are in favour.

Well, you know Albertans. They stubbornly refuse to join in the vilification of fossil fuels, and they remain unmoved by two decades of relentless fearmongering about global warming, with the poll showing just half the province believing that humans are changing the climate (fewer than half believe it in Calgary, a city with one of the country’s highest concentrations of university graduates).

But in Ontario, where Kathleen Wynne’s government just foisted a cap-and-trade version of a carbon tax on residents, antagonism is nearly as high. A Nanos poll released this month and conducted for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation found only 31-per-cent support for the scheme, with 61 per cent opposed. PC voters, NDP voters, and astonishingly, Green voters all dislike it. The majority of people even in the enlightened GTA disapprove. Only Liberal voters were more inclined to support it. Meanwhile, nearly 70 per cent of those polled believe the carbon tax will cost their households a lot more than the $13 a month the government claims.

And why shouldn’t they distrust the Liberals’ claims about this, the latest in a catalogue of falsely advertised climate policies? Under former premier Dalton McGuinty, these Liberals promised to “bring stability to Ontario’s electricity market,” only to deliver climate policies that sent rates haywire to the point many can no longer afford their electric bills. They lied, too, about the grotesque cost of cancelling fossil fuel power plants. Yet Ontarians heard Wynne just a year ago still sounding oblivious to the low-carbon catastrophe they’ve been enduring, insisting she’s “happy to defend the changes that we’ve made."

McGuinty is long gone now, off somewhere lying lower than his legacy (his last Tweet was four years ago). Wynne’s cringeworthy personal popularity numbers, 16 per cent barely a year before the next Ontario election, suggest she’ll soon be joining him in disgraced exile. Like them, Alberta’s NDP is choosing to ignore the bubbling anger from constituents over being force-fed aggressive, expensive climate policies they never asked or voted for.

Albertans clearly aren’t buying the NDP’s alibi that the carbon tax was a way to win “social licence” for pipelines. They’ve not been bribed into tranquillity by minor rebates. In Alberta, as in Ontario, restive voters see a high-handed government with its own agenda that doesn’t care what they think, or want. Americans who felt that same frustration created the presidency of Donald Trump. The leaders who follow Wynne and Notley won’t likely resemble Trump. But if whoever comes next fails also to heed the backlash against unwanted, costly climate policies, someone who looks a lot more like him could well be along soon.