Carbon tax is a conservative idea

Canada’s top conservatives rally to show they don’t care about climate change

Ontario premier Doug Ford and Jason Kenney will take on their favourite bête noire — Liberal and NDP carbon taxes — at a rally this week to be held on the grounds of the Calgary Stampede.

Canada’s most belligerent conservative leaders performing in the same room at the same time.

Should be quite a show.

Of course, Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, is not a premier yet. But he hopes to be by this time next year and like Doug Ford has promised that carbon pricing will be scrapped as soon as he takes over.

Carbon emissions? Climate change? Who cares?

Since federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer also wants to smash carbon taxes to smithereens it would be easy to conclude that carbon pricing is some left-wing scheme that conservatives have to trash if they are to be true to themselves.

Whatever the labels — carbon taxes, carbon pricing, or putting a price on pollution — they are actually conservative ideas. Prominent Conservatives such as Preston Manning, and former Alberta Treasurer Jim Dinning started promoting the idea years ago. Mark Cameron, former policy director in the Prime Minister’s Office under Stephen Harper recently stated that Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax plan is a “smart conservative policy.”

Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta and one of the architects of Alberta’s climate change strategy earlier this year told a parliamentary committee studying Trudeau’s carbon pricing legislation that carbon pricing “leverages the power of the market to enable emission reductions.” Instead of relying on government edicts and regulations, individuals will make decisions about how much fossil fuel they want to use given the price.

That kind of talk should be music to the ears of a conservative.

But instead, Kenney has focused on the word “tax” and talks about it as a punishment for ordinary people driving their cars and heating their homes.

Never mind study after study has shown that most people in Alberta will not only get significant rebates for the carbon taxes they paid but in some cases will get more than they paid.

Still, there’s no question that Kenney’s take on carbon taxes goes over well with a lot of Albertans.

In part it’s a response to the recession caused by the oil price slump and resentment at having to pay more for something during tough times.

Never mind that Alberta still has no sales tax and relatively low small business and corporate taxes.

Albertans also see policies designed to deal with climate change as a threat to their jobs in the oil and gas industry, the province’s main economic driver.

This became clear in a recent provincewide effort to gauge Albertans’ attitudes toward climate change.

Most said it was not an immediate or pressing problem and very few mentioned burning fossil fuels as a cause of climate change.

Conservative values and connection to the oil and gas industry were the strongest predictors of participants’ dismissive attitudes toward climate change.

Ford and Scheer don’t seem to know or care what should be done to significantly reduce

carbon emissions.

Since carbon pricing is a key part of NDP Premier Rachel Notley’s climate change policies and has been in place for over two years, it could well become the main issue in the next election. Especially since the NDP hoped carbon pricing would thwart opposition to oil pipelines in the rest of Canada: a strategy that has so far failed.

But at least Notley had a plan that attempted to recognize both the fossil fuel industry as a key economic driver and the need to reduce carbon emissions.

Neither Kenney, Ford, nor Scheer have any such plan.

Kenney seems to believe that Alberta can simply ignore what the rest of the world is doing to reduce carbon emissions and thereby reduce demand for fossil fuels.

He has no plan for how Alberta workers could transition from the oil and gas sector into equally gainful employment.

Ford and Scheer don’t seem to know or care what should be done to significantly reduce carbon emissions.

The three Conservative leaders simply want to ride an angry anti-tax wave in hopes of defeating the Trudeau Liberals.

Even if it means trashing conservative values.

What a con job.