TORY HOPEFULS OPT FOR PARTY VOTES OVER WHAT THE GENERAL PUBLIC WANTS
Contenders throw red meat to base with unrealistic promise to scrap carbon tax
All the contenders to lead the Progressive Conservative party are now against a carbon tax, pledging to either destroy their own party’s platform or conjure billions of dollars in cuts nobody will notice.
What happens when they have to sell this to voters outside their party, let alone maybe actually do it, isn’t clear. Worry about it later.
Doug Ford was against a carbon tax from the moment he launched his leadership campaign after ex-leader Patrick Brown’s sudden flame-out in January. Christine Elliott and Caroline Mulroney flopped around briefly before realizing where the leadership votes were to be had.
Let’s review for a sec. Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” promises of middle-class tax cuts and health spending rely completely on billions of dollars in transfers from a federal-government carbon tax that kicks in in 2019 for any province that doesn’t have a system of its own for taxing greenhousegas pollution. Ontario has a Liberal-designed cap-and-trade scheme already operating that brings in $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion a year. The People’s Guarantee would scrap that and replace it with the heavier federal tax, worth about $4 billion a year.
Whether Ford, Elliott or Mulroney could stop the federal government from imposing a carbon tax and giving the Ontario government the proceeds is, let’s say, iffy. But they’re on record as wanting to.
What tipped Elliott over was a poll she put on her website. You could click a picture of a smirky Justin Trudeau with a “yes” label to say you supported a carbon tax, or one of an elegant Elliott with a “no” label to say you opposed one. Of the 1,535 people who clicked, 92 per cent went with Elliott over Trudeau.
Government by web poll. Remember that Elliott’s pitch is that she’s the adult in the race.
Caroline Mulroney asked around and also concluded that Tories don’t want a carbon tax.
With the confidence of a practised B.S. artist, Doug Ford says he’ll still be able to do everything — he’ll just find several billion dollars of waste to cut, easypeasy. Mulroney and Elliott have not publicly stated plans yet for coping with the billions in lost revenues. Maybe also waste. Even with a carbon tax, the Tories already promised to find $2.8 billion of pointless spending nobody will miss, so a whole lot will have to go and we don’t know what.
Last fall, Abacus Data conducted a national survey to gauge attitudes on climate-change policy, asking people whether they’d vote for a party that didn’t have a climate-change policy. They found a roughly even split between respondents who said they’d never vote for a party that had no policy, and respondents who said they’d consider it.
They broke the Ontario numbers out of the national findings for me. As of early November:
■ 51 per cent of Ontarians would only consider candidates and parties “committed to finding ways to combat climate change”;
■ 44 per cent would consider candidates and parties “that did not put emphasis on climate change”;
■ Five per cent would actively prefer a party that has no climate-change plan.
There’s a left-right division on the question but it’s not as stark as you might expect. According to Abacus:
■ 33 per cent of self-identified right-wingers would only vote for a party committed to fighting climate change, versus 68 per cent of lefties and 51 per cent of centrists;
■ 56 per cent of right-wingers would consider a party that didn’t emphasize climate-change policies;
■ 11 per cent of right-wingers would prefer a party without a climate-change plan.
(The survey was conducted online and included 424 Ontarians aged 18 and over between Oct. 31 and Nov. 2, 2017, Abacus says. A random sample was invited to complete the survey from a large representative panel of more than 500,000 Canadians and the results were weighted in keeping with census population data.)
There’s a split in Ontario and the Progressive Conservative members the leadership candidates are courting are on the smaller side of it.
Hate for Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals could obviously overwhelm a voter’s preference for a party with a climate-change policy, of course; it’s hard to imagine many of the one-third of right-wingers who want a strong climate-change policy going Liberal or New Democrat. But likewise, a centrist inclined to vote Tory might be repulsed by a leader so determinedly against carbon pricing that he or she is willing to give up on everything else.
Carbon taxes and tradable emissions permits are the two major ways of attacking climate change humanity has come up with in the past 20 years, other than just having governments give orders. Maybe the Progressive Conservatives can invent a fourth way between now and June.
Unless they do, they risk a rerun of the 2014 campaign, which they ran with a platform full of holes and shoddy accounting. The Tories ran that campaign as unapologetic small-government conservatives and the conventional wisdom is that that’s why they lost. Maybe a bigger problem is that they ran as stupid unapologetic small-government conservatives.
Of course, sometimes that works. Winning with a platform you can’t possibly implement is its own hell, but it’d be better if we all weren’t in there together.