Canadian carbon politics about to get interesting
Year began with feeling of unity, but 2019 vote could prove divisive
OTTAWA— If you look back to this time last year — before Doug Ford and the carbon tax resistance, before the Trans Mountain purchase and the alarm bells from the United Nations — climate politics in Canada look calm, even quaint.
At the start of 2018, more than 85 per cent of Canadians were living with a price on greenhouse gas emissions. British Columbians had been paying a carbon tax for 10 years. Ontario’s nascent cap-and-trade regime was set to be linked with programs in California and Quebec. Even Alberta, home of the carbon-belching oil sands, was on board with its own fuel levy and tax-free emissions allocations for heavy industry.
The year started collaboratively. Manitoba joined the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change in February, leaving Saskatchewan the only province that refused to sign the cross-country agreement. But that was then. The past year saw an eruption of conflict over Ottawa’s bid to ensure a carbon price was implemented across the country by 2019. Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government dismantled cap and trade and is spearheading resistance to what Premier Ford calls Justin Trudeau’s “job-killing carbon tax.” In September, Manitoba abandoned its carbon tax plans in September and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley pulled out of the Pan-Canadian Framework in protest over delays in the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Now Ottawa is set to impose a two-pronged carbon price in four provinces, even while they band together to challenge the federal government’s authority in two separate court cases.
It makes for dramatic politics, and the confrontation over climate change — and what to do about it — could take a prominent spot in the national discourse during an election year, said Christopher Ragan, chair of the Ecofiscal Commission in Montreal.
“I think the federal election will be fought on carbon pricing,” Ragan said. “I think it will also be fought on pipelines.”
The provincial opposition to Trudeau’s carbon price plan has percolated for a long time. Ragan pointed out that, while Manitoba was briefly on board with the Pan-Canadian Framework, the province would only agree to a carbon tax on its own terms, set at $25 per tonne, even as the federal government mandates the levy must increase to $50 per tonne in 2022. Similarly, Alberta cancelled plans to raise its own levy from the current $30-per-tonne when a court quashed the approval for the Trans Mountain expansion, which the federal government purchased this year from Texas oil giant Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion, in a bid to ensure it gets built.
But in Ragan’s view, it was Ford’s takeover of the Ontario PC party and victory in the June election that served as the prime catalyst for the climate acrimony in Canadian politics. After all, Patrick Brown — the party’s previous leader and potential premier-in-waiting — promised to swap Ontario’s cap-and-trade program for a carbon tax in the province.
“If Ontario hadn’t flipped, this would be quite a different debate,” Ragan said. “It would have looked like a western resistance as opposed to a bigger resistance, and in Canada that’s a big difference.”
In October, the Liberal government announced how it would apply its carbon price in provinces that refused to set up their own system that met federal standards. Starting Jan. 1, heavy emitters in Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Manitoba will have to start measuring their greenhouse gas output. By next year, those that pump out more than emissions allotment set for their respective industries will have to buy credits from their competitors or pay the carbon tax on their excess emissions.
Then in April, the political doozy: The federal fuel levy will kick in at $20 per tonne of emissions. That will knock up the price of gas by four cents a litre, and climb to 11 cents a litre in 2022, when the levy hits $50 per tonne of emissions.
David Coletto, chief executive of Abacus Data, said the arrival of the levy in Canada’s most populous province coincides with his firm’s research that suggests Canadians are increasingly worried about the effects of climate change. There have been severe floods in Quebec and New Brunswick in recent years, as well as devastating forest fires in B.C.
And while provincial opposition to Trudeau’s climate plan has increased — and could get another boost if United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney wins Alberta’s election in May — the 2019 political season could pose a challenging dynamic for the federal Conservatives as well, Coletto said.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has promised to campaign with a credible plan to curb emissions that won’t include a carbon tax. Coletto’s research shows most Conservative supporters don’t rank climate change as a top concern, but many Canadians outside the party mark it as a priority. So if the 2019 campaign centres on climate change, the Tory plan will need to be robust enough to win support from voters outside the party tent, Coletto said.
On the left side of the spectrum, Coletto sees potential for the New Democrats or the Green Party to make the case that Trudeau’s climate plan isn’t strong enough. Both parties already oppose the Trans Mountain expansion — Green Leader Elizabeth May was arrested protesting the project — and environmental activists are criticizing Ottawa’s decision to increase its support to the oil industry, most recently in mid-December, when federal ministers unveiled a $1.6-billion package of loans and grants to help companies during a slump in the price of Canadian crude.
Reports from the United Nations and environment commissioners in Canada have also shown the country is on track to miss its Paris accord emissions reduction target of 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. And that goal already falls short of the requirements outlined in an eye-grabbing UN report in October that called for “unprecedented” change across sectors of the economy if the world is to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
“Is there space for a party to argue the Liberals haven’t gone far enough or fast enough on this issue? I think the answer will be, does this debate just get polarized between the Liberals and the Conservatives?” Coletto said.
He predicted the Conservatives will frame carbon pricing as an affordability issue, arguing that the federal proposal will hurt the economy and raise the cost of living, and the Trudeau government will argue that fighting climate change with carbon pricing is a moral necessity.
It adds up to one likelihood: After an acrimonious year of climate politics, the fight will continue into the 2019 campaign season.
“This is probably the election in which climate and climate policy feature more prominently than ever before,” Coletto said.