Pierre Poilievre’s climate policy is a joke

There’s a growing irony in the carbon tax increase falling on April Fools’ Day every year, since it now offers an annual reminder of just what a joke the Conservative Party of Canada’s approach to climate change has become. As if to really underscore that point, former CPC environment and climate change critic Dan Albas shared a piece from a retired economics professor named Steve Ambler that seemed to question the science behind climate change. "If greenhouse gases are a problem,” it reads, “they’re a global problem. Canada can do nothing by itself to solve it.”

That “if” is a massive tell, but it’s hardly the only one in the piece. It also suggested, bizarrely, that a recent study shows “we should be subsidizing rather than taxing the use of fossil fuels” and trades in the obvious straw man that Canada is supposed to solve climate change on its own. What’s worse than these sloppy arguments is the fact they were published in The Hub, an online publication that’s generally regarded as the home of serious and sophisticated conservative thought in Canada. Its willingness to endorse what amounts to warmed over climate change denialism speaks to just how far the Conservative movement it supports has slipped since 2022 when Pierre Poilievre took over as leader.

So, too, does the contrast between the CPC’s current beliefs on the issue and those its thought leaders espoused back in the pre-Poilievre era. As the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Brian Lee-Crowley wrote in a piece for the National Post back in 2022, the CPC needs an “adult position on climate change.” That position “must acknowledge that climate change is real and poses a serious risk to the environment and Canadians’ well-being. What we need is the fastest, least costly and most effective path toward cutting emissions.”

In other words: we need carbon pricing, albeit with some modifications from the Liberal government’s rebate-oriented approach. Instead, the Conservatives have doubled down on their efforts to salt that field, trading any hope of an adult position on climate change for a decidedly childish willingness to lie, dissemble and otherwise misrepresent the carbon tax. And so far, at least, the people advocating for the carbon tax don’t seem to fully appreciate that they’re now dealing with glorified adolescents.

The recent letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Canada’s premiers, for example, still assumes they’re engaged in rational dialogue rather than actively perpetuating political vandalism. An open letter signed by most of this country’s eminent economists mistakenly assumes a shared interest in pursuing solutions where none exists. “The most vocal opponents of carbon pricing are not offering alternative policies to reduce emissions and meet our climate goals,” it says. “And they certainly aren't offering any alternatives that would reduce emissions at the same low cost as carbon pricing.”

The fact of the matter is that today’s Conservatives aren’t interested in reducing emissions unless it involves the oil and gas industry getting credit for it. Previous CPC leaders were at least willing to feign interest in addressing climate change, and there’s some lingering support for doing more on that front in certain dimly lit corners of the party. But these are now exceptions to the CPC’s new rule, and it’s one that all the well-meaning open letters in the world won’t change. Poilievre’s party is not for turning, least of all here.

That’s why the carbon tax conversation is a distraction at this point. Worse, it actually helps the CPC avoid talking about its preferred climate policy of doing nothing. We should instead be talking about what a Poilievre government would do here and what that could mean for our future. Might it eliminate the entire carbon pricing infrastructure, including the industrial pricing system that long predated the federal carbon tax and will do the heaviest lifting on Canada’s emissions? Might it even pressure provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario to repeal their own industrial carbon pricing systems?

That’s a very real possibility. And while it would thrill those within the Conservative base who helped elect Poilievre as leader, it would also put Canada at odds with the vast majority of our major trading partners at the very moment when they will be accelerating their investments in clean energy and decarbonization. In the process, we would surrender whatever control we might have had over the energy transition’s impact on our export-oriented economy. As University of Alberta economics professor Andrew Leach noted in his recent book, “There is no option for business-as-before. Our choice will increasingly become whether to act responsibly on our own initiative or have standards imposed on us by the rest of the world.”

Poilievre might actually prefer the latter, if only because it would give him someone new to blame. And if Canadians really want to zig at the moment when the rest of the global economy is zagging, well, I suppose we have that right. The British voted for Brexit, after all, even though its negative economic impacts were obvious at the time and continue to reverberate. But if we’re going to commit economic and environmental suicide, we should probably talk about it first.