With repeated political outings and partisan rallies denouncing the carbon pricing of Justin Trudeau’s government for two years, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are achieving their goals. The federal carbon tax appears to be at a crossroads. Not only does the Conservative leader promise to abolish it, but even provincial Liberals are turning their backs on it. Climate action pays the costs of the rising cost of living, of short-sighted political aims that outweigh the vision of the future, but also of the failure of the Trudeau government to protect its own environmental legacy.
Convinced of the virtue of their climate plan, the federal Liberals took too long to respond to the conservative leitmotif. However incomplete it may be, this credo of Pierre Poilievre, making the carbon tax the lightning rod of financial insecurity, has ended up percolating in the minds of Canadians, but also of their politicians. Opposition to the increase in the price of the carbon tax, scheduled for 1er April, is now manifesting itself both in the conservative ranks and in those of the provincial liberal family. In Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the leaders of the Liberal parties called for the postponement of this annual increase, as did their colleague from Newfoundland and Labrador, Liberal Prime Minister Andrew Furey, who had thus followed in the footsteps of six of its provincial counterparts.
The leader of the Ontario Liberal Party (OLP), Bonnie Crombie, is not hostile to the principle. A member of the same cohort as Justin Trudeau, she was elected to federal Parliament in 2008 under the leadership of former leader Stéphane Dion and his avant-garde Green Plan proposing the creation of a carbon market. Today elected head of the PLO, Mme Crombie promises not to re-register Ontario on the Quebec and California carbon exchanges, claiming that Ontarians “cannot afford more taxes at this time.” Even this former colleague of Mr. Trudeau does not want to bear the odium of preaching the survival of a form of carbon pricing.
However, Quebec and British Columbia cannot be the only ones to maintain this pricing of consumer pollution, when one day or another the Trudeau government ends up giving way to the federal Conservatives. Popular opinion, however, supplants political courage in the majority of provinces, with more than half of Canadians (56%) believing that the fight against the increase in the cost of living must prevail over the fight against climate change.
This same probe from the Angus Reid Institute also confirms the educational failure of the Trudeau government. Barely 72% of respondents are aware that Ottawa pays them a rebate every quarter in return for the carbon tax paid. And although Justin Trudeau emphasizes that this reimbursement exceeds the bill for eight out of ten households, 45% of respondents believe the opposite. Renaming the obscure “climate action incentive payment” to the clearer “Canadian carbon rebate” — and including it as such on checks and bank deposits — was wise, but probably too late.
Obviously, the liberal message was unable to counter the conservative hype. He even contributed to it, by temporarily exempting oil heating from the carbon tax and thus supporting the idea that it added to the burden of the cost of living.
In five years, the Trudeau government has failed to convince the population of the merits and effectiveness of this part of its greenhouse gas reduction strategy, leaving it vulnerable to conservative attacks sometimes bordering on dishonesty. Mr. Poilievre notably persists in claiming that the carbon tax will increase by 23 cents per liter of gasoline… rather than 3 cents per liter.
While recognizing that carbon pricing aims to financially force the adaptation of polluting behavior, the federal Liberals could have from the start highlighted the equally real cost of inaction. It’s not just up to environmental groups like the Climate Institute of Canada to point out that Canadians already pay an average of $720 per year to repair the damage from disasters caused by global warming.
Just as the Trudeau government itself could point out that nearly a quarter of global GHG emissions are now covered by 73 carbon pricing mechanisms, according to the World Bank. Escaping this global shift would not only harm Canada’s international reputation – which the Conservatives perhaps pay little attention to – but could above all slow down foreign investment or lead to the imposition of “border adjustments for carbon”. Another economic argument that Pierre Poilievre, however, ignores.
Beyond his own political legacy, Justin Trudeau should have fought from the start to ensure the survival of carbon pricing, first and foremost for the sake of the climate fight. But the months of this important mechanism for reducing pollution seem on the contrary to be more and more numbered.