Why Wynne and Jerry Brown are soulmates

Jerry Brown’s world tour against global warming came to Canada this week to sign up his most faithful fellow traveller.

Fresh from a whirlwind tour of the United Nations, California’s maverick governor flew north so he could witness Premier Kathleen Wynne’s final accession to his coalition.

The Jesuit-trained Brown welcomed Wynne not merely as a soul mate but an “insurgent” in his global crusade. Voice booming, visage beaming, the former presidential aspirant joined Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard at a historic three-way summit in that province’s legislature.

“We are the insurgent forces,” Brown proclaimed to the assembled journalists, a few of whom wondered why progress has been so slow. “It’s very simple — there’s a lot of money on the other side, and that’s the status quo,” he mused, an oracle among media admirers.

By inking the deal Friday, Wynne was linking Ontario’s cap and trade regime to a cross-border system that will be the world’s largest outside Europe. Our two biggest provinces are joining forces with California, which boasts the world’s sixthbiggest economy and a population greater than Canada’s.

It is a political-environmental embrace that has been a long time coming. And it faces continuing headwinds not just in the White House, but at Queen’s Park.

Despite the challenges from Donald Trump’s presidency — or perhaps because of them — Brown has rallied all allied forces in sight. Before Friday’s signing ceremony with Wynne, he made the rounds of his fellow governors in New York City, whom he also hopes to sign up.

Earlier in the week he met UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, and lobbied foreign diplomats in the corridors. And last May, he flew to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People — a rare audience granted to a subnational leader.

The elaborate byplay suggests Brown is busily promoting an alternative foreign policy, an environ- mentally constructive agenda to counter Washington’s obstructive, destructive, anti-ecology agenda. Proof that the president isn’t omnipotent.

“What we have in North America is not a monolithic, top-down, total control,” Brown explained to his Canadian audience Friday. “Today you’re witnessing three of the subnational jurisdictions committing themselves to a very powerful carbon market, and we expect others will follow.”

Wynne — whose early talk of an “activist centre” never quite caught on — is going along for the ride. Ontario’s premier pointedly reminded the media that when she first plotted strategy with Quebec on cap and trade, they faced only naysaying from then-PM Stephen Harper — until Justin Trudeau took power: “We were living in a country that had a federal government that was not interested in working with us, was not on side, and I think that’s the importance of sub-nationals.”

But sub-nationals aren’t always aligned. At Queen’s Park, Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown threw cold water on the global warming juggernaut Friday, dismissing their climate change coalition as a “new slush fund” that will enrich both Ontario’s Liberals and California’s elite.

While the three summiteers hailed their market-based method to place a price on pollution, he vowed to “dismantle the Wynne Liberals’ cap-and-trade cash grab” that will end up “subsidizing the wealthy in Beverly Hills.”

It was an apparent shot by Brown at his namesake, the popular California governor driving cap and trade in America. But, awkwardly for Ontario’s PC leader, his most influential political role model — former Quebec premier Jean Charest — was the main driver of cap and trade in that province, as Couillard pointed out dryly.

In contrast to Ontario, California’s governor has faced less opposition in his home state. Former Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has backed the counterattack against Trump, and several Republican lawmakers joined state Democrats in toughening up their cap and trade system in a legislative vote last July.

Now, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are talking about joining a modified cap and trade system in the northeast. And New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo hinted at a possible merger with the broader emissions control system embraced by California and the two Canadian provinces.

“The states are picking up the baton,” Brown boasted.

At 79, in his second tour as governor, Brown is winding down after 40 years in public life. At 64, Wynne is trying for her second act in politics, trying to maintain a 14-year Liberal streak in power with an election looming.

But while the premier thinks of legacies — she spoke Friday of fighting climate change on behalf of “my grandchildren” — Brown insists his passion transcends any “cockamamie legacy” politics. Possibly because he doesn’t have any grandkids.

“This isn’t for me,” the aging governor likes to tell audiences, who lap up his legacy line. “I’m going to be dead. It’s for you.” Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn