O’toole must triangulate on federal carbon tax
Erin O’toole has got a big decision to make on climate change — should he attempt to appropriate the Liberal’s environmental plan by adopting a consumer carbon tax?
The Conservative leader told the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade last week that his election platform will cut greenhouse gas emissions faster than a Liberal plan that will increase the carbon tax to $170 a tonne by 2030.
O’toole said he will make those reductions and get to net-zero by 2050, without implementing an “out-ofcontrol federal carbon tax.”
But the pressure to convince Canadians he is serious about climate change, not to mention the need to find major emissions cuts, may yet force him to co-opt the Liberal plan, sources say.
Bill Clinton’s team called it triangulation — the idea of solving a problem that motivates the other party’s voters, to defang them politically.
Clinton moved his Democratic Party from a welfare state mentality to focus on the difficulties of the middle class.
His successor, George W. Bush, triangulated too — “matching a conservative mind with a compassionate heart” to reverse decades of Republican insensitivity to poverty.
The key, as Clinton strategist Dick Morris pointed out, is to co-opt the opposition’s issue, while still commanding the loyalty of your party’s core supporters.
Straddling that divide takes great political skill and it’s not clear that O’toole commands the allegiance that would be needed to carry his party with him.
But the Conservative leader needs to do something.
Poll after poll shows him trailing Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, particularly in voterich Quebec and Ontario, where he is doing no better than his predecessor, Andrew Scheer.
He has strong support among men but is doing dismally with women. Polls suggest nearly half of all voters would not consider voting Conservative, compared to only 35 per cent who would not consider voting Liberal.
A credible climate-change plan might grow the voting pool of those who could be persuaded to take a look at the Conservatives. As Bill Gates noted in an interview in the Guardian this week, the experience of the pandemic bears a “strong connection” to what will happen if we don’t address climate change. People want their governments to look ahead and make provision.
A poll for the Canadians for Clean Prosperity organization suggested climate change is a top priority for swing voters in the 905 commuter belt surrounding Toronto. The same organization polled Conservative-held ridings in the West and said two-thirds of Conservative supporters would accept a carbon tax if it helped the party form government.
The concern for O’toole’s team is that the remaining third are the party’s bedrock, hard right conservatives who might be persuaded to vote for the nascent Maverick Party, if O’toole moves to the centre too quickly. “There is definitely a growing number of people in Alberta who are fine with carbon pricing. But the vocal minority who aren’t are our party supporters,” said one Conservative.
A carbon tax would clearly upset Alberta Premier Jason Kenney who supported O’toole’s leadership bid. He has been a staunch opponent of the federal climate-change plan.
The solution for O’toole could be in the design of his own plan. The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems, rather than simply to match their moves. “Use your tools to fix their car,” said Morris in his book, Power Plays.
O’toole could position his plan as a tax shift and propose to cut income taxes by an amount commensurate to carbon-tax receipts. Since only one third of voters even know the proceeds of the tax are rebated to them, it could prove a winner.
It could be further tailored to Conservative sensibilities by exempting farmers and making provision for rural residents and small businesses.
My sense is that O’toole and his team would like to make that strategic leap but, in the face of resistance from Western MPS, they probably won’t.
O’toole promised to scrap “Trudeau’s carbon tax” in his leadership bid. At the time, he said it was up to provinces whether they use market mechanisms or carbon pricing to meet their targets.
He said an O’toole government would “make industry pay, rather than taxing ordinary Canadians,” in the form of industry regulation.
The election of President Joe Biden will help. Regardless of which party wins the Canadian election, the next government is likely to form a carbon customs union with the U.S., harmonizing fuel economy standards, co-operating on clean electricity and new technologies like hydrogen and electric vehicles. Biden has talked about a border adjustment tax, which would penalize countries that do not have some form of carbon pricing.
A harmonized North American market would allow Canadian governments to remove the output pricing mechanism, under which large emitters pay an average of 20 per cent of the carbon tax to ensure they don’t shift production to the U.S.
But industrial production accounts for just one third of Canada’s emissions. The country won’t meet its Paris targets, far less achieve net zero, without policies that cover the other two thirds.
As Michael Bernstein at Clean Prosperity pointed out, a consumer carbon tax is viewed as the litmus test of whether a political party’s climate plan is credible. No amount of equivocation about emissions being a provincial issue or marching in lockstep with the Americans, is going to conceal the lack of an economywide carbon reduction plan.
O’toole has already crossed the Rubicon. He believes in man-made climate change and the need for a price on carbon to reduce emissions. It was never clear in the last campaign that Scheer really believed either of those things. His unconvincing performance gutted his own plan.
There is a case to be made that carbon pricing is not particularly effective. Jessica Green, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, studied 37 separate carbon pricing regimes and found they had limited effect on emissions.
But that is not O’toole’s reservation. He is more concerned that carbon taxes are unfair to individuals and punitive to provinces.
The solution is to combine the best policy from each party’s agenda and leave behind the worst.
“If Erin O’toole doesn’t like a Liberal carbon tax, he should create a Conservative version,” said Bernstein. “It’s going to be very hard to sell a climate plan in areas like the 905 if the headline is that you’re repealing the carbon tax. So don’t just repeal — repeal and replace.”
O’TOOLE promised TO scrap ‘Trudeau’s carbon Tax.’