Conservatives just can’t quit the carbon tax

After years of promising to axe the carbon tax, Conservatives watched in obvious horror as Prime Minister Mark Carney did it for them on his first day in office. They could have chosen to take a victory lap here, celebrating the elimination of a policy they’d sunk huge amounts of political time and treasure into attacking, and moved on to the far more pressing matters at hand. Instead, they threw a collective temper tantrum. Maybe Mark Carney isn’t as inexperienced at the whole politics thing as some people assumed. 

His decision to zero-out the consumer carbon tax with the stroke of his prime ministerial pen is starting to look like a well-laid trap that his opponents jumped headlong into over the weekend. Melissa Lantsman, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, suggested on Friday that “he’s pausing it for the election so he can trick you into believing it’s gone.” Former CPC leader Andrew Scheer described it as “a con,” apparently all part of his “Carbon Tax Scam.” And on Saturday, Poilievre got in on the act. “After 9 years of battling for a carbon tax, do you really trust the Liberals not to bring it back? Dream on.”

The trauma of watching their signature campaign pledge get enacted by their new opponent reverberated throughout the Conservative universe. Pundits like Postmedia’s Lorne Gunter suddenly discovered the virtues of a rebate that they had heretofore barely noticed, while former CPC staffers tried to quibble with the method Carney chose to implement his change. As The Line’s Matt Gurney joked, “it's clear that the only thing holding the Conservatives back from the crushing majority they were heading for only months ago is that they need just a few more tweets decrying the PM's stunt signing of the piece of paper.”

But nobody seems more traumatized — or triggered — than Pierre Poilievre. On Monday, as if to reclaim his rightful place as the axer of carbon taxes, he released a video promising to eliminate the industrial carbon tax if elected. That’s the part of the carbon tax that is expected to have, by far, the biggest impact on reducing Canada’s emissions. By promising to axe it, Poilievre is choosing to stand in stark contrast to Carney, who has promised to increase the stringency of the tax paid by large industrial emitters like oil sands facilities, aluminum smelters and natural gas power plants. 

This seems like a pretty major miscalculation on Poilievre's part. Canadians still support climate action, especially in the regions of the country like Ontario, B.C. and Quebec where Conservatives need to win seats, and they’re probably happier to see large industries do the heavy lifting than themselves. Even the industries that pay the tax are mostly happy with it. In an open letter to provincial environment ministers back in October, industry groups and major companies in the cement, steel and clean energy sectors endorsed the policy and suggested some ways to improve upon it. “Industrial carbon markets are the most flexible and cost-effective way to incentivize industry to systematically reduce emissions,” their letter said. 

Poilievre’s pledge to kill the industrial carbon tax will force his party to spend more time talking about climate change than it would probably like, and expose its weaknesses on that front to the voters who care most about it. But the biggest political danger for him here might be on the Canada-U.S. file, which has taken on an understandably existential dimension over the last few months. That’s because while cutting taxes and ignoring climate change might play well in Donald Trump’s America, it’s squarely at odds with what’s happening in the countries where we need to increase our trade flows.

Europe, after all, has a so-called “carbon border adjustment mechanism” for imports of steel, aluminum, cement and fertilizer, while Great Britain is expected to implement its own similar mechanism in 2027 — effectively imposing a carbon  tax on imports from countries with higher-carbon industries. They could easily expand these border carbon taxes to include oil and gas imports, which remains a subject of almost obsessive interest among Canadian Conservatives. And China, which already has the largest carbon market in the world, is expected to begin including areas like oil refining in the near future — one that might discourage it from importing barrels with higher associated emissions.

In an election that will be fought over who can best protect Canada’s economy from Trumpism, Poilievre’s promise to kill the industrial carbon tax is therefore an in-kind donation to the Liberals. It will allow them to raise important questions about his commitment to climate policy and his willingness to break with Trump and Trumpism, ones that are of particular importance to voters outside of his Alberta and Saskatchewan strongholds. It will also continue to distract him from the issues where his party is stronger, whether that’s affordability or fatigue with the Liberal government. 

Make no mistake: the loss of the consumer carbon tax is a tragedy for evidence-based policymaking, one that will make it harder and more expensive for Canada to reach its emissions reduction targets. The Conservatives deserve most of the blame for their relentless campaign of political vandalism, while the Liberal government gets some for barely even trying to defend their signature climate policy. But like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick, Poilievre’s obsession with the carbon tax may end up being his undoing — and demise.