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When it comes to the carbon tax, the truth never stood a chance

Pierre Poilievre's constant misrepresentation of the carbon tax helped undermine its viability. But so did some decisions made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, and now BC Premier David Eby, photographed on January 22, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

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This is apparently how the carbon tax ends in Canada: not with a bang but a surrender. Last week, B.C. Premier David Eby acknowledged his government wouldn’t maintain the province’s long-standing consumer carbon tax — one that predates the federal version by a decade — if a future federal government eliminates its own. The desperate promise may yet revive his faltering re-election campaign, but it effectively declares the time of death for Canada’s biggest climate policy. 

It didn’t have to end like this. It was, after all, a conservative government in B.C. — the confusingly-named BC Liberals — who introduced the first consumer carbon tax in 2008. A year earlier, meanwhile, Alberta implemented its own modest carbon price on large industrial emitters. Even the Stephen Harper Conservatives were talking favourably about carbon pricing back then. 

Alas, this emerging consensus was far more brittle than it might have seemed. After the Alberta NDP brought forward its own consumer carbon tax in 2015 and the Trudeau Liberals largely copy and pasted its contents into their own 2018 legislation, most Canadian Conservatives abandoned their previous interest in conservative solutions to climate change, like markets and prices, in favour of a combination of do-nothing whataboutism and outright deceit and disinformation. 

But while the principal architects of the collapsing carbon tax consensus are Canada’s conservative politicians and pundits, progressives deserve plenty of the blame. After first failing to communicate its carbon tax and rebate to Canadians and then, giving Atlantic Canadians a transparently political exemption on it, it’s clear the Trudeau Liberals did about as poor a job as they possibly could. The belated opportunism on the part of the federal NDP, which is abandoning its longstanding support of the federal carbon tax and rebate without offering up any alternative plan, doesn’t make it look much better. 

First, the good (or at least less bad) news here. When it comes to climate change and Canada’s commitment to reduce its emissions, the elimination of the consumer carbon tax isn’t necessarily fatal. The industrial carbon price, the one being paid by large emitters, does most of the heavy lifting on Canada’s emissions reductions. It may yet survive the current conservative onslaught if only because big business understands the necessity of competing on carbon in the 21st century. 

There are other ways to reduce emissions, from consumer subsidies and incentives to industrial regulations. As Simon Fraser University economist Mark Jaccard has been arguing for almost a decade now, regulations can achieve similar reductions in greenhouse gas emissions without the attendant political trials and tribulations. As I’ve argued in the past, when it comes to climate policy, this isn’t necessarily a hill we have to die on.

But when it comes to our politics, maybe it is. That’s because the Conservative campaign against the carbon tax has overwhelmed the best efforts of this country’s leading economists and climate policy experts. Those of us who pay attention to the facts already knew Conservative claims about the carbon tax’s supposed impact on inflation and the economy were massively (and deliberately) overstated. Most of us probably believed, perhaps naively, that the truth would win out in the end. 

We were wrong. 

The carbon tax was a litmus test for our collective ability to sort fact from fiction and put the interests of future generations ahead of our own. On both counts, we have failed miserably. The inevitable demise of the carbon tax is proof that the best ideas don’t automatically win the day, and truth is no defence against weaponized deceit. It’s also a victory for a kind of political nihilism that is ascendant across the Western world right now, one that doesn’t bode well for our ability to meet or manage the challenges that surely lie ahead. 

The imminent death of the carbon tax is a political victory for Canada's Conservatives -- and a defeat for our politics as a whole. After all, when deceit and disinformation can triumph over facts and evidence, what else are we capable of ignoring?

As former prime minister Brian Mulroney said in a 2019 speech, “Leaders are not chosen to seek popularity. They are chosen to provide leadership. There are times when voters must be told not what they would like to hear but what they have to know. They must realize that there still is a place for daring in the Canadian soul.”

Alas, our current set of political leaders doesn’t seem all that interested in the verdict of history. They’re interested in their own immediate futures, whether that’s staying on as prime minister in the face of impossible odds, abandoning their party’s support of the carbon tax to win back working-class voters they never should have lost or lying incessantly to Canadians to make (and keep) them mad. If good climate policy has to die so their political careers can continue living, well, that's apparently a sacrifice they're willing to make. 

We don't get off the hook here completely, though. If there’s an overarching lesson from climate policy over the last decade, after all, it’s our collective indifference to the future and unwillingness to make the sacrifices required to actually improve it. Yes, many of us say that we value action on climate change, but only if that means someone else is actually the one taking the action. Unless and until that changes, we’ll continue to be vulnerable to politicians who promise to make others pay the cost — or worse, pretend that it doesn’t even have to be paid in the first place. 

 

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