Federal and provincial Tories at odds on carbon taxes

Federal Tory leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary is against pricing carbon-dioxide emissions to fight climate change. Provincial Tory Leader Patrick Brown is in favour of it. Which puts Leeds-Grenville MPP Steve Clark, a Tory who backs both guys, in a delicate spot.

Clark became one of O’Leary’s highest-profile supporters in Ontario on Friday.

“I think Patrick and Kevin and I all agree that Kathleen Wynne’s carbon tax — jobkilling carbon tax — is nothing more than a $2-billion cash grab every year,” Clark said Tuesday, finessing. “The reality is, Patrick Brown, when he’s elected premier in 2018, he’ll dismantle Kathleen Wynne’s cap-andtrade plan.”

At that point, things will get tricky.

Brown wants to “replace it with a model that reduces emissions in Ontario, cuts taxes, and protects the Ontario economy,” he says.

A year ago, at a party convention in Ottawa, Brown stunned the room by announcing he supports putting a price on carbondioxide emissions, with the goal of reducing them because they’re contributing to climate change. He might as well have promised a windmill on every lawn and tofu in every pot.

O’Leary, the candidate of bombast and aggression, vows a crusade against any premier who does what Brown says he wants to do.

So the Ontario Liberals, in full election-attack mode, fired out a statement Tuesday accusing Clark — Brown’s deputy leader, mind you — of “insubordination,” “challeng(ing) his leader’s carbon tax policy position,” raising questions about Brown’s leadership qualities. You could hear the cackling from here. Clark’s not having it. “I support Patrick 100 per cent,” he said. O’Leary’s against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s stance in favour of pricing carbon, Brown is against what Wynne is doing specifically, and Clark thinks they’re both right. This is a very finely drawn position.

That moment in Ottawa comes up again and again when you talk to Progressive Conservatives about their leader. They’re definitely not over it. Consider Jim Karahalios, a prominent federal Conservative activist who had been seeking the provincial nomination in Cambridge. He eventually decided that being a federal Tory was incompatible with being a provincial Tory and bailed out.

“How can I follow my conservative values, my federal party — and good old-fashioned common sense — by opposing the carbon tax at the federal level, and yet at the same time join a campaign to peddle a cynical carbon tax hoax on Ontario taxpayers at the provincial level?” Karahalios wrote in a letter to supporters. It’s two dense pages, nearly all of it about the folly of carbon taxes.

Nearly all the federal Tory leadership candidates oppose taxing carbon, he pointed out. (Michael Chong is the big exception and he gets booed at debates when he brings that up.) O’Leary is the most militant about it, promising to “go to war” with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley over her government’s carbon tax. As prime minister, O’Leary says, he’d cut federal transfers to provinces by whatever amount their carbon taxes bring in.

Put aside whether O’Leary knows what he’s talking about, or cares. The vehemence of the sentiment is what matters here. “Carbon taxes don’t work and need to be repealed immediately,” he says.

(Pricing carbon emissions, and especially doing it via capping them and letting emitters buy and sell emissions permits, used to be the conservative solution to climate change. Price signals and markets working their efficient magic, etc.)

The arrival of the Ontario Liberals’ actual cap-and-trade program has helped Brown a little: He’s been able to focus on the implementation rather than the principle. Brown and other Tories have attacked the Liberals’ plans in the legislature — for raising the price of gasoline an estimated 4.3 cents a litre, for burying the effect on naturalgas prices in home heating bills, for increasing the cost of living generally.

The Liberals claim the plan is revenue-neutral, but what they mean by that is they’re planning to spend the money their carbon-permit auctions raise (the first auction brought in $470 million, they announced Monday) on environmental initiatives.

That’s not what “revenueneutral” means to any normal person.

There’s stuff there to go after, and opposing is the opposition’s job. But at some point Brown will have to put forward his alternative plan for governing, his public support for pricing carbon emissions is clear and he’s going to have to say what that’ll mean if he becomes premier.

Clark is, for now, standing on the one bit of common ground Brown and O’Leary share. It’s in danger of crumbling under him.

Patrick Brown might as well have promised a windmill on every lawn and tofu in every pot.