Doug Ford’s bad opener

Doug Ford always said he was going to scrap Ontario’s system of pricing carbon to fight climate change.

Still, the incoming premier has picked a surprising place to start.

His first act in dismantling the provincial cap-and-trade regime is to kill the program that helps ordinary Ontarians — homeowners, renters and business owners — lower their energy bills.

Why? According to his spokesperson, that’s simple: “Doug Ford is delivering on his promise to put more money back into people’s pockets.”

That he isn’t actually doing that — and, in fact, is doing quite the opposite — seems not to faze the Ford camp in government any more than it did when this was just a campaign slogan.

The Green Ontario Fund is putting money in people’s pockets for installing smart thermostats, insulation, windows and other energy-efficient items. And still more money in the pockets of the business owners and workers who provide them.

That’s something that seemed to come as a surprise to Ford who — after two days of backlash from customers and businesses left in the lurch — was forced on Thursday to extend the program’s death-date for existing applications to the end of October.

Ford’s swift move to end this energy-conservation program raises questions about what he intends to do with the millions sitting in the fund.

Will he try to scoop that up as a jump-start on his claim that he can save billions through the magic of “efficiencies” in government operations?

That fund was financed by carbon-polluting industries that purchased credits to exceed their emission limits. Companies have purchased nearly $3-billion worth of pollution credits to operate under the existing cap-and-trade program.

The previous Liberal government intended to invest that in programs such as energy retrofits for aging highrises and transit to further reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Will Ford give that money back in some convoluted scheme demanding, for example, that fuel companies pass on the money to customers at the pump?

Or will he try to keep it? And put millions of it toward paying lawyers to battle Ottawa’s plan to impose a carbon tax on Ontario.

The federal government has stated that any province that doesn’t have its own carbon-pricing scheme in place by 2019 will inherit the federal carbon tax. Ford, naturally, has said he’ll fight that. Ford hasn’t officially taken the reigns of provincial power — that happens on June 29 — and already he’s shown he can destroy something. He has yet to show he can build anything.

Ford didn’t get rid of the Green Energy Fund because he has a better idea about how to drive energy conservation. Nor is he promising to scrap cap-and-trade because he thinks there’s a better way to combat climate change.

He seems not to be thinking about that at all. For him, environmental issues have far more to do with politics than a dangerously warming planet.

His predecessor as party leader, Patrick Brown, at least had a plan to replace the provincial cap-and-trade system with the federal carbon tax.

Climate change is real. Even Ford has said he believes it’s a problem. But it’s not one that, so far, he’s shown any vision or interest in tackling.

Ontario’s existing cap-and-trade regime, which is linked with Quebec and California, is a serious effort to fight climate change by putting a price on carbon.

It’s also the way of the future. Europe is on board and, increasingly, so are American states. Even China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, has started a cap-and-trade program.

During the election campaign, Ford routinely made breezy pronouncements and said the details to make some sense of it would soon follow. They never did.

He was elected without ever releasing a comprehensive document on his plans to govern Ontario or, just as crucially, how he’d pay for what he did promise.

That’s a troubling pattern he seems intent on continuing.