Conservatives must lead on climate change
We must remember when Tories led Canada away from past environmental threats
Just before Christmas, I arrived at a Kitchener home to take care of a lawn sign pickup request, a post-federal election tidy-up activity I’ve continued to chip away at.
A gentleman fetched the lawn sign from his garage, where it had visibly been toughened up by hockey pucks from his kids’ off-ice efforts.
“Your party has to do something on climate change,” the hockey dad said as he handed me the sign. He added that while he tended to vote Conservative, the party was absent on climate change, an issue of great concern for his family, including for his young children who worry about their future.
I often received this feedback throughout the election, as I canvassed tens of thousands of households, visited retirement homes, or conversed with school-aged voters.
Undoubtedly, Tory electoral success will require a strong rebound on climate action, which consistently ranked among Canada’s top three voter priorities. But most important, I believe, as climate urgency escalates, Canada needs Conservatives to once again lead on the environment.
Efforts are falling well short globally and nationally, as each passing UN climate conference since 2015’s Paris Agreement reveals ever greater shortfalls in collaboration. We don’t have to look too far back in our history, however, to find examples of Canada leading collaboratively on the environment. Conservative PM Brian Mulroney, widely held to be the greenest prime minister in Canada’s history, led multilaterally to protect the ozone layer and bilaterally alongside the U.S. to stop acid rain.
Conservative leadership has gotten Canada — and the world — unstuck on past environmental threats. It can again. But we Conservatives first have to get ourselves unstuck on climate change.
First, we must communicate often with Canadians on the issue with a clear position. This was made especially evident to me at a local environmental debate I participated in during the election. After, some attendees expressed their surprise at my climate action knowledge and passion. They asked, “Why don’t we ever hear any of that from your party?”
Of course, we Conservatives shouldn’t participate in all-toocommon climate theatre, disguising action with bravado, but we must affix a clear position to our brand that acknowledges the threat, stresses domestic action, builds multi-level government cooperation, and leads in global collaboration.
It’s my hope that in addition to party members adopting these tenets into our policy declaration’s environmental principles, Conservative caucus members will champion them as well.
Second, we should cease our attacks on carbon pricing. While we’re correct in calling out the current government’s defect-ridden carbon tax regime, a full-throated war on pricing carbon is inconsistent with our policy and detrimental to our credibility.
The truth is, Canada’s Conservatives do price carbon. The last federal Conservative government priced carbon indirectly through various mechanisms. Our 2019 Conservative election platform priced carbon directly for Canada’s heaviest emitters. Why not be clear then that we believe there’s a place for carbon pricing in climate policy? It would save us a great deal of political capital that we could reinvest in providing better climate policies for the domestic menu.
Third, Conservatives could work to establish how we’d take Canada’s climate fight global. We know that Canada is well positioned to displace or mitigate global methane emissions from coal produced in countries like China, India and the U.S. by leveraging our cleaner resources and carbon capture and storage innovation. The economic upside comes with substantial climate wins.
But how would we do it? As the world stumbles along via the Paris Agreement’s Article 6, Conservatives could explore new kinds of partnerships with other countries, giving the world more Canada to help reduce global emissions in a meaningful way. We’ve done it before on major environmental challenges of the past. Which Conservative leadership hopeful could take us there again, challenging for Canada’s greenest prime minister?
It’s time we find out. Because Canadians — literally — cannot afford to have the left dominating the dialogue, lest we become a country wrecked on trying to solve global issues by madly stomping on our own toes. That won’t course correct on climate change.
I believe it’s Canada’s Conservatives that can chart that path. If we better communicate our position, clarify our carbon pricing aim while building our domestic platform, and determine a framework to bolster international collaboration, we can earn Canadians’ confidence that we’re the party of choice for climate action.
If successful, I expect that over the next elections we’ll see across Canada a growing number of Conservative party lawn signs, absorbing more puck marks made by worryfreer children.
Alan Keeso has an MBA and an MSc in the environmental sciences from Oxford University. He is a strategy consultant for small businesses and ran for the Conservatives in Kitchener South — Hespeler in last October’s federal election.