Drive Clean no great loss, but Ontario needs a climate plan

It’s not surprising that the Ford government killed the provincial Drive Clean program Friday. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing.

For years, the auto emissions reduction plan brought in by Mike Harris in 1999 has been problemplagued. In the early 2000s, media investigations found evidence of fraud and mismanagement. The bookkeeping was suspect. Over the years, successive governments have tinkered with it, in some cases improving it, in others not doing much of anything.

Increasingly, the program is out of date. Passenger cars and trucks are made differently today than they were in the ’90s. There are generally fewer really old vehicles on the road. About two million vehicles a year are tested, but in 2014, for example, only 135 cars failed the test.

But owners of older vehicles were faced with getting the tests done regardless. Until the Liberal government killed the $30 test fee, it was also an annual expense. But while killing the fee helped consumers, it put the government on the hook for $40 million a year. That’s money saved.

Yet the program is still credited with taking 335 tonnes of pollutants out of the air every year. That might be a worthwhile trade if the government had something to replace Drive Clean. But in typical Ford style, the program is being axed with no suitable replacement. The government is promising a new program to reduce pollution from heavy commercial vehicles, but there’s no evidence that will balance out and, in any case, saying they’re going to do it and actually doing it are two different things.

This is Ford’s modus operandi: See something you don’t like and scrap it. He did it with a perfectly sound sex education curriculum. He did it with Basic Income pilot project. He did it with cap-and-trade. All done without having better programs to replace them, and all without consideration for the impact on people from the cancellation. Take cap-and-trade, for example. Killing it addressed Ford’s personal ideological agenda, but it also killed the associated revenue so hundreds of millions that was flowing to schools, municipalities and infrastructure immediately dried up. And Ford didn’t lift a finger to help mitigate the damage he caused.

The big worry in this case is that the loss of Drive Clean, cap-and-trade and other environmental policies means this province has literally no plan to deal with, manage and adapt to climate change. We have taken a huge step backwards, and Ford’s just getting started.

Listen to what Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe said in her report.

“Dismantling a climate change law that was working is bad for our environment, bad for our health and bad for business. When pollution is free, we can expect more of it.”

The government says it has killed these programs because they weren’t effective. So what is? Where is the Ford government’s plan to deal with climate change? Cap-and-trade isn’t effective. Ford plans to spend $30 million to fight a federal carbon tax, because it won’t be effective, either. We know a lot about what Ford doesn’t like. But he has said nothing about better plans. Is that because he doesn’t have any?

The government is promising a new program to reduce pollution from heavy commercial vehicles, but there’s no evidence that will balance out and, in any case, saying they’re going to do it and actually doing it are two different things.