Rare right-winger backs Trudeau’s plan on carbon
To enemies and some supporters alike, Quebec Premier François Legault is the closest we’ll ever get to Donald Trump. Though specious, the comparison rings true in certain ways.
Like the 45th U.S. president, Legault rode to power by exaggerating and demonizing the effects of immigration. And like Trump, Legault has made it a priority to reduce immigration numbers to satisfy his base, despite serving as a crucial renewal for an aging workforce. In this case, ideology has trumped simple math in both Trump’s America and Legault’s Quebec.
Yet the two diverge on virtually everything else — including, notably, the environment. Trump has been typically scattershot on the issue of climate change: either it doesn’t exist or it’s just too big a problem.
Legault’s infinitely more reasonable approach serves as proof that he is no conservative doctrinaire. Unlike Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer and a clutch of recalcitrant provincial premiers, Legault clearly sees the importance of moving ahead with carbonreduction plans.
“I am for cap-and-trade,” Legault said recently, referring to Quebec’s participation in a carbon trading market with California.
Legault recently took the stage with Justin Trudeau, declaring himself an environmental ally of the well-coiffed Liberal and noted lightning rod for Conservative scorn. He even promised to bring the message of carbon reduction to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, the country’s reigning champion of bumper-sticker conservative populism, who recently backed out of the carbon trading market.
The Quebec premier’s take, as well as his choice of bedfellow, should serve as a caution to
the scads of Conservative politicians currently balking at the very idea of a carbon tax. Legault is hardly a tree-hugging leftist, and his position on carbon reduction isn’t born of some David Suzuki-themed flight of fancy. Rather, Legault realizes that being against such a thing can be damaging to his career in particular and conservative politics in general. In this regard, he is far ahead of just about every other right-flank Canadian politician today.
Consider the numbers. While the issue of immigration dominated the most recent provincial election campaign, the environment was a far more urgent issue for Quebec voters. Some 16 per cent of voters felt it was the most pressing issue, according to CBC/Radio-Canada’s Vote Compass, which tabulated the priorities of more than 150,000 participants. By comparison, only five per cent ranked immigration first.
Seventy-five per cent of Vote Compass participants said they supported harsher environmental norms “even if this translated to an increase in prices.” Moreover, the results were similar across all age groups, and hardly varied between urban and rural populations. Getting Quebecers to agree on the time of day can be an exercise in futility. And yet on the environment, it would seem we are practically unanimous.
Legault’s political pragmatism has national implications. Scheer, who expects to be prime minister this time next year, has spent several months and gobs of political capital denouncing the federal Liberal government’s carbon tax plan. In Scheer’s world, it isn’t just a tax, which is bad enough; it’s an extension of Trudeau’s feel-good elitism, akin to selfies and genderneutral national anthems.
Like Trump, Scheer at once minimizes climate change while suggesting the problem isn’t ours to solve. Like Trump, Scheer seems to believe cutting carbon is analogous to cutting jobs. Unlike Trump, Scheer’s political fortunes run through Canada.
And nearly every poll conducted on the issue suggests that Canadians as a whole are like Quebecers writ large: they agree that a carbon tax is a necessary evil, at the very least. Conservative politicians who ignore the numbers and who ignore the Quebec premier, who has clearly studied them to death, are writing their own political obituaries. Martin
Patriquin is a Quebec writer.
He is far ahead of just about every other right-flank Canadian politician today.