The climate is changing, why won’t Tories?
Party leader Andrew Scheer is taking a lot of flak these days from fellow Conservatives for not being liberal enough when it comes to abortion rights, samesex marriage and Pride parades.
A different leader, they argue, one who is more in tune with the times, would quickly reverse the party’s fortunes.
But reversing its outdated views on climate change and what needs to be done about it is likely to prove much trickier. The Conservatives seem to have boxed themselves in with ideas about the climate crisis that are even more retrograde than Scheer’s prudish refusal to participate in Pride parades.
Is it just a matter of partisan politics? Whatever Liberals propose, Conservatives will oppose in hopes of bringing them down?
Roger Gibbins has been dissecting politics in Canada, particularly the West, for decades, as a political scientist and the president of the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation before he retired and moved to Vancouver.
He thinks there is more to the Conservatives’ stance on climate change than partisanship.
He argues that the Conservatives simply didn’t believe that climate change policies warranted high priority during the election campaign so they never took the time to figure out what they should aim for and how best to get there.
Instead, they simply bet that promising to get rid of the carbon tax would win them the votes they needed to form government.
“No sense wasting energy by debating alternative solutions; if there is no problem, then why waste time talking about solutions. Thus the Conservatives were flat-footed in one of the major campaign issues,” Gibbins wrote in an email.
According to Gibbins, voters don’t oppose taxes, old or new, if they are convinced that the ends to which those taxes are directed, such as health care or education, are important.
“The assumption seems to have been that Canadians will resist new taxes (and the related growth in government). However, if those same Canadians believe that addressing climate change should be a priority (at least to a degree), then waving the (taxes are bad) flag will not resonate,” Gibbins added.
Jim Farney, a political scientist at the University of Regina maintains that a lot of conservatives believe that the push to reduce carbon emissions is a threat to the middle-class way of life. Former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall specifically referred to that when he came out against the Liberal carbon tax in 2016.
And yet, Farney added, “the sort of things that conservatives have suggested they would do would actually cost the middle class more than the carbon tax will.”
Even after an election in which two-thirds of Canadians voted for parties with much stronger climate change platforms than the Conservatives, they are still determined to hang on to their losing strategy.
After a bruising caucus meeting after the election, Scheer made it clear he will not drop opposition to the carbon tax, claiming “we needed to do a better job communicating that plan to Canadians.”
It didn’t seem to occur to him that it wasn’t that Canadians didn’t understand the Conservative plan — they didn’t think it was any good.
Just last weekend, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning tried to have it both ways.
He told the CBC that Conservatives need to pay more attention to environmental issues but should still stand against the carbon tax imposed by the Trudeau Liberals.
Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission — a well-funded academic research project that involved economists, oil industry executives and former politicians, including Paul Martin, Jean Charest and Gordon Campbell — strongly disagrees.
In its final report, released last week, the commission found that broadbased carbon pricing, such as the Liberal plan, was the least expensive (for consumers) and the most effective option for reducing carbon emissions and thereby curbing climate change.
Relying solely on voluntary emission reduction programs and small subsidies to encourage technology development, as the Conservatives proposed during the election campaign, will do nothing to curb emissions from either large industrial polluters or individual consumers.
So where do the Conservatives go from here when it comes to tackling the climate crisis?
Taking their heads out of the sand would be a good start.
Scheer made it clear he will not drop opposition to the carbon tax