Can Trudeau sell skeptical public on tax?

On Tuesday, at 10:15 a.m., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was scheduled to unveil a carbon tax for provinces that hadn’t implemented sufficiently ambitious ones of their own. It was to occur in Room L-125 at Humber College, a polytechnic colossus in the northwest corner of Toronto, and that made sense. Room L-125 is all about sustainable energy. It is full of large, heavy, complicated high-tech stuff. The lectern was set up in front of a giant contraption labelled “SOLAR THERMAL TROUBLESHOOTING — CLOSED LOOP.” Arriving reporters were advised students in Humber’s sustainable energy and building technology program would explain what on earth that meant. Itwasnottobe.

At 10 a.m., Trudeau’s people announced there would be a delay. Fifteen minutes later, they moved the press conference to a sort of giant yurt set up in a parking lot, where Trudeau had been scheduled to host a town hall meeting with Humber students at 11 a.m.

So much for the demonstration. And much for the very flimsy apolitical pretext for holding the event in Etobicoke North, which just happens to be represented provincially by Ontario Premier Doug Ford — scourge of carbon pricing and most everything else Trudeau claims to support these days.

Was Trudeau sending a message to Ford and the other premiers and premiers-in-waiting united against his carbon plan — notably Scott Moe in Regina, Brian Pallister in Winnipeg and Jason Kenney in Edmonton — that he was not to be trifled with?

“I don’t see the premiers as opponents; I see them as partners,” was Trudeau’s laughable response to that question.

Ford’s press release on Tuesday called the tax “massive,” “punishing” and “jobkilling”; claimed it would do “nothing for the environment”; and predicted beggary for every central-casting sympathetic character from the senior citizen to the soccer mom to the small business owner. “Trudeau should be ready for a fight,” Ford vowed.

It’s no stretch to say Trudeau has bet his job on Canadians — Ontarians, certainly — finally being ready to pay for the battle against climate change. But 12 years after Stéphane Dion’s brave but complicated Green Shift plan, the Liberals have at least arrived at the simplest, most retail-friendly pitch: They’ll tax carbon, but they’ll give all the money back.

Ontarians, Saskatchewanians and New Brunswickers will see their “carbon rebates” almost concurrently with the carbon tax’s implementation in April: They will apply for them on their 2018 tax returns. Trudeau argues that will help cushion the blow of more expensive gasoline, electricity, natural gas and other unavoidable staples, he vows the average family will actually come out ahead of the game. He will want voters to assume this will remain the case as the tax rises from $20 per tonne of carbon to $50 by 2022, and who knows how high beyond that. Fifty bucks a tonne isn’t nearly enough to meet Canada’s emissions reductions commitments.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer calls the rebates “an election gimmick,” but goodness knows sending out cheques to people months before an election has worked in the past.

So who wins this showdown?

“There’s lots of good evidence from B.C. and other jurisdictions that (carbon pricing) has worked — that not only do people respond to prices in general but to carbon prices in particular,” says Dale Beugin, executive director of the Ecofiscal Commission. “And emissions in B.C. are five to 15 per cent lower than they would have been in the absence of (the provincial) carbon tax.”

Unfortunately for carbon tax proponents, British Columbia, Canada’s best evidence for the efficacy of carbon pricing, also bolsters the case that this is all a tax grab. B.C.’s carbon tax started out revenue-neutral. It’s not revenue-neutral any more.

“The people of Canada are too smart to believe that Trudeau’s phoney rebates are anything more than a temporary vote buying scheme that will be discarded once the election is over,” Ford said in his statement. That might ring true.

There is also a surprising amount of what seems to be genuine confusion over the very concept of a revenueneutral carbon tax. Asked how carbon pricing works on Tuesday, Trudeau made a pretty good fist of it: “At the simplest level, we put a price on something we don’t want: pollution,” he said. “It’s basic economics that if you start putting a price on something you don’t want, people will look at ways of not having to pay that price.”

It’s a pretty intuitive pitch: Your average human being responds to price signals many times every day, and not just unconsciously. Then Trudeau suggested Canadians take Nobel Prizewinning economist William Nordhaus’s word on the matter if they don’t want to take his.

It’s no knock on Nordhaus to say his work is unlikely to win many Canadian election campaigns. Trudeau has rather bravely embraced the best and easiest case for carbon taxation: Even if you don’t give a crap about any of this, you’re not going to be any worse off. He embraced it, publicly, in Doug Ford’s backyard. He needs to win this argument by himself, and he had better gather the requisite rhetorical ammunition.