Trudeau carbon plan flummoxes Ford
Nominally he is our provincial premier.
Nationally, he is remaking himself into Captain Canada.
We give you Doug Ford, carbon-tax-fighter-in-chief.
One day he’s in Regina, the next in Calgary, cavorting with Tories while caviling against carbon taxes until he can start all over again in Toronto.
Back home Monday, he hosted Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe for a return visit. Tuesday he huddles with federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer for another carbon-bashing session at Queen’s Park.
As global warming looms over the planet, how did our humble province emerge as the national locus of the counterattack against carbon taxes? It’s not complicated.
Taxes are toxic. Anti-tax rhetoric is the catnip of Canadian politics, fuelling Ford’s crusade.
Any pretense of transformational politics has given way to transactional politics — where most voters calculate what’s in it for them, and premiers perform their own calculus.
Ford has figured out what worked for him in the June 7 election, when he promised to “axe the tax.” He hasn’t stopped since.
“As soon as I finish one campaign, I start campaigning right away the next day,” he boasted at a joint news conference with his Saskatchewan counterpart Monday. “I’m protecting the taxpayers of Ontario. That’s my job. I was elected to fight against taxes and the federal government wants to put an unfair tax on the backs of Ontario busi- nesses and families. It’s a terrible tax.”
But what if it’s not the carbon tax he imagined it to be? What if Ford is fighting a phantom?
In fact, the federal proposal is closer to the “carbon fee and dividend” model espoused by conservatives in the U.S. and Canada for years — a revenueneutral measure that raises money only to see it go back out again as rebates, so that the treasury is no further enriched. It is not merely a “price on pollution,” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prefers to call it, but a price signal designed to deter polluters in the same way that high cigarette taxes discourage consumption.
Unlike cigarette taxes, the money isn’t going into general revenues, but being disbursed in an elaborate cash-back program. Think of the premiums you pay for the Canada Pension Plan — which are segregated and invested by the CPP Investment Board and returned to you years later as retirement payouts that are worth far more.
Are CPP deductions truly taxes if they are returned to you in larger amounts? Are pensions somehow a scam, in the same way that Ford decries the “carbon tax scam?”
A similar debate played out over Ontario’s previous capand-trade program, which also used market forces to compel polluters to reduce their carbon footprint — by lowering the “cap” on total emissions, and forcing them to “trade” their way to compliance by buying and selling allowances at auction. Every economic analysis shows that Ontario’s cap-and-trade program, modelled on successful counterparts in Quebec and California, would have achieved better results at lower cost than a conventional carbon tax, by incentivizing innovation and investment.
The premier’s mischaracterizations of cap and trade — it is a cost of doing business, not a carbon tax — helped him defeat an unpopular Kathleen Wynne in Ontario’s election. Now, he is redirecting his rhetorical attacks against Trudeau, even though it is entirely thanks to Ford that we lost our cap-and-trade exemption and will be subject to the federal carbon backstop starting in January.
The premier has long been spoiling for a fight. Ford knows what he knows — that while Canadians love paying lip service to the environment, they are loath to pay up for it.
“The good news is Canadians coast to coast are fighting back against the Trudeau carbon tax,” the premier proclaimed Monday, reading from his teleprompter.
But this is not the clunky carbon tax target he was banking on when he vowed to spend $35 million on a doomed court battle to stop Ottawa from imposing a price on pollution. To repeat: While fee and dividend puts a price on carbon, the government gives the money back at year’s end — leaving people with the option to keep even more money in their pocket through conservation and fuel efficiency.
Ford appears flummoxed by the cash flow. One moment, he accuses Trudeau of picking people’s pockets (taxes being theft in Tory terminology). In the next breath, he accuses Trudeau of buying people’s votes by giving the money right back to them.
Which is it — theft or bribery? Both, in a manner of speaking — or, in political parlance, a potential win-win for both consumers and the environment.
Unless Ontario’s new national tax-fighter-in-chief plays spoiler. Catnip for Captain Canada.