NEXT FAST FORD MOVE
Cap-and-trade gets the axe
The Ontario government formally killed its cap-and-trade program Tuesday, revoking the regulations that made companies that emit a lot of carbon dioxide buy permits to do it.
It’s the second big thing the Progressive Conservatives have done in the four days since they took office and the second with a seat-of-the-pants feel to it.
“Cap-and-trade and carbon tax schemes are no more than government cash grabs that do nothing for the environment, while hitting people in the wallet in order to fund big government programs,” Premier Doug Ford said in a news release.
He campaigned on a promise to pull Ontario out of the international carbon market it joined at the beginning of this year under former premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals and he’s doing it. The point of that system was to let companies that could reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions most efficiently do so, while letting companies that make a lot of money off whatever they do that emits those gases keep it up if they paid for it. As of Tuesday, trading permits became illegal in Ontario.
The Progressive Conservatives estimate the move will cut the price of gasoline in Ontario by 4.3 cents a litre almost immediately and will reduce prices of other goods.
It also throws those “big government programs” funded by $2 billion in annual cap-andtrade revenues into doubt. Those include renovations to hospitals, schools and social-housing buildings, provincial funding for bike paths and transit and numerous other things like a program to promote new wood construction technologies to replace carbonintensive concrete.
“Decisions to continue any specific initiatives currently supported by the (cap-and-trade) fund will need to be paid for out of the tax base and will be made on a case-by-case basis,” Ford’s news release said. So maybe the $657 million the province has promised for social-housing renovations, for instance, will be spent after all. Or not.
The announcement included the government’s third take on what will happen to a program that gives rebates on some home renovations aimed at energy conservation, including credit for installing new windows.
Before Ford was even sworn in, on authority nobody has ever made clear, the bureaucracy announced the GreenON fund was being scrapped and would only honour rebates for work done by the end of August — a problem for plenty of homeowners because manufacturers and installers have months-long backlogs.
Ford himself told reporters at one point that actually the deadline would be in October. Tuesday’s announcement seemed to postpone it indefinitely: “Ford committed that his government will honour arrangements where contracts have already been signed and orders have already been made, such as energy efficient insulation and window retrofits,” it said, mentioning no time limit.
Around midday, the GreenON fund’s website changed the deadline for installation from August to October. That now matches what Ford said before, not what he said most recently.
Whether companies that own now-worthless permits might be compensated remains unclear.
The Tories have ministers, but don’t yet have staff around them. Their announcements don’t include nuts-and-bolts details that suggest they’ve thought these things all the way through. They don’t have ministerial press secretaries and the permanent communications staff in the ministries hasn’t been told much. I put a bunch of questions to two ministries Tuesday and got no answers by the end of the day.
Health Minister Christine Elliott announced Saturday the government will cut back the Liberals’ pharmacare program (called “OHIP+”), which covered several thousand of the most prescribed medications for Ontarians aged 25 or younger. Young adults or parents getting drugs for their kids just show health cards at pharmacies and the government gets the bill.
Under the revised program, the government will cover those drugs only for people who don’t have private insurance.
“Since insurance plans can cover thousands more drugs than the 4,400 currently available through OHIP+, children and youth would have access to more medications than under the current program,” Elliott said.
Private insurers were still free to cover those additional medications under the Liberal plan, so it’s not really clear this is better from the consumer’s perspective. It means more paperwork and higher premiums for the private coverage, while creating an incentive for employers who negotiate benefits plans to cut youth drug coverage and shift costs to the government anyway. There will be caps, deductibles and partial coverage through private plans to sort through.
But on the flip side, this is the sort of national pharmacare plan the federal Liberals have former Ontario health minister Eric Hoskins exploring — a backstop, not the first line. It will save money for the Health Ministry at least in the short term, some percentage of the $465 million the full OHIP+ program was budgeted to cost each year.
How much? The government doesn’t seem to know. Starting when? Er, at some point.
When you’re campaigning, you can wave away all the uncertainties about your promises — as Ford did throughout the spring. Now that the Tories are in government, uncertainties and unintended consequences affect real people.