The heat’s on Scheer for stance on climate change
Andrew Scheer is a brave man. Despite a plethora of polls that say climate change is a major concern of voters, he is promising to abandon the measure that scientists and economists say is the best tool available for curbing emissions.
Scheer is betting that other polls — those saying Canadians don’t want to pay a carbon tax — are more in tune with national sentiment than those saying the environment is up there with the economy and health care on the list of voters’ top priorities.
But Canadians who are less concerned about climate change and more concerned about the cost of a carbon tax are, by and large, the ones who have already made up their minds to mark their ballots for the Conservatives. So, from a purely electoral perspective, his stance is puzzling
Scheer doesn’t need to win support across the Prairies. He needs to get votes in places like Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals are going to lose seats, and in Quebec, where the NDP has collapsed, in the fickle 905 around Toronto, and in British Columbia, which is a crapshoot for every party in every election.
A lot of those people are worried about global warming. According to a recent Abacus poll, eight in 10 Canadians think climate change is a serious problem and half believe it is a national emergency. You don’t need to be a tree hugger to notice the growing number of powerful storms on a planet that continues to break monthly heat records. Ordinary people are genuinely afraid of a looming catastrophe of floods and drought — if not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren.
Scheer has, so far, responded to those fears by releasing an environmental platform that was hilariously called “A Real Plan to Protect Our Environment” by Conservative boys having a little fun.
It promises to impose standards on big polluters without saying what those standards would be. It relies on subsidies to entice people and companies to reduce their carbon footprints — but subsidies have proved to be far less effective than carbon taxes at tackling emissions and they are funded by taxes of another sort.
And it proposes that Canada, under a Conservative government, would help other countries reduce their carbon footprints rather than focus on what we need to do here.
Scheer may ultimately benefit from the fact that climate change is a complex subject, and proposals for mitigating it do not make light reading. He may, throughout the course of the campaign, convince a few fence-sitting voters that climate change is a problem created in other countries, or that taxes don’t stop pollution, or that the “crisis” has been manufactured by powerful international environmental organizations. But he needs a lot more than a few swing votes to win the election.
He needs to lure many soft liberals who are disillusioned with Justin Trudeau, and New Democrats who are as discouraged with their own party as they are with the record of the Liberals. Those people will, in the main, be reluctant to vote for someone who appears to be lukewarm about whether man-made global warming is actually a thing.
In addition, they have already received an income-tax rebate on the carbon tax imposed by the Liberals. They are unlikely to believe that scrapping it is going to significantly improve their financial situation.
Having determined long ago that killing the carbon tax would be the central plank in his campaign, Scheer can hardly reverse course. But he needs to do something over the next few weeks to convince centrist Canadians he believes global warming is a problem.
He can start by saying so. The insipid environmental plan he released last spring states that human activities are a “major contributing factor” to global
He needs to do something over the next few weeks to convince centrist Canadians he believes global warming is a problem.
warming. But Scheer himself seems reluctant to utter those words. When asked to point to instances where he has publicly acknowledged that industrial emissions are playing a significant role in climate change, his staff dredged up an old CBC Radio interview in which he said: “The Earth’s climate is changing and I think human beings have an impact on their environment.”
That is not the same thing as saying emissions from industry and automobiles are a major factor in climate change. He needs to be more clear. He has a platform release coming up. He needs to introduce something, anything, that says he is serious about the issue.
The Liberals have managed to convince voters they are concerned about climate change without actually having a plan that will meet Canada’s international commitments. Scheer needs, at a minimum, to do the same.
Because bravely pleasing his own constituency by promising to scrap the carbon tax is not going to win over the large number of undecideds who are, nevertheless, decided about climate change.