We're having an election this year. And Leyland Cecco writes in The Guardian that the environment will be -- among all the issues -- front and centre:
When Canadians cast their votes next October, they will do so amid standard electoral issues: jobs, the economy and foreign policy. But in a country largely dependent on resource extraction, a pair of politically fractious additions have risen to the top: carbon taxes and pipelines.
Trudeau's carbon tax kicked in yesterday, and Andrew Scheer echoed Ontario premier Doug Ford's claim that it was "the worst tax ever." Scheer has no plan for the environment. He says it will come later. That should comes as no surprise. Conservative policy and rhetoric has, for decades, been a mixture of cynicism and anger.
But Trudeau is also being attacked from the left:
“The only true test of a climate change plan, after all, is whether carbon is going up or down,” said the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, in a statement about his frustrations with the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which runs from Alberta to the British Columbia coast.
So it will be all about how the argument is framed -- and how well Canadians understand the frame:
The tax could end up being particularly appealing from an electoral standpoint, said Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. All proceeds from the levy will be remitted back to households in the form of a cheque, the first of which will arrive in July – a date Wiseman suspects will be close enough to the election that people will take notice.
But Wiseman, who has studied the country’s elections for generations, cautions: “We’re still a long way off. And things can change on a dime in politics.”
We live in interesting times.
Image: The Toronto Star
10 comments:
That Trudeau is issuing what is essentially a 'prebate' before the election suggests to me cynical politics at work, Owen, if not a full-blown abuse of power. And it begs the question of how a rebate that will likely find the majority of Canadians enjoying a net benefit will act as a deterrence to carbon use.
Unfortunately, Lorne, as the reign of Mr. Trump makes abundantly clear, politics these days is all about the money.
Scheer is patently odious, definitely my last choice. Trudeau, however, has shown us the value of his promises. He wants a carbon tax at the gas pump but won't hear of a carbon export tax on the bitumen he wants to flood onto world markets. Most of that will never be taxed and all of the emissions associated with it will wind up in our most important commons, the atmosphere. Is cognitive dissonance a synonym for hypocrisy?
Good question, Mound. The name of the game seems to be obfuscation.
.. 'a country largely dependant on resource extraction' ..
Now I cannot give that premise a free pass.. and swallow it whole. Having worked in many Canadian provinces, as a guy with diverse skills & reasonably observant, a varacious reader etc etc. I must ask re any source docs, Stats Can facts via census.. that validate such a premise. Just as I would insist on seeing facts re the most dangerous segments to Environment.
You know.. is it methane escape, lumbering, manufacturing, fisheries, green industry, education, schoolchildren or migrants from Guatemalan refugees, or tow trucks that will get our environment in the end ? Without question though.. does resource extraction represent the greatest threat of all ? Hell, I dunno if manufacturing & exporting light armored vehicles with machine guns and rockets launchers stifles our environment more than growing tomatoes or watering the lawns.. though I have my suspicions..
We need cold hard facts is my point, accompanied by context, common sense, rationale.. and we need population control or plague. We are eating spaceship earth & expecting it to remain in orbit, fruitful, life supporting and wondrous. As elections and all their attendant scams, ads, lies, propaganda, scandals - you name it.. And when we are overwhelmed by Lying Disease of partisan media, we need the antidotes. Mainly, crisp concise coherent common sense truths that cannot be denied. Ideological blather is just that. We actually vote for riding candidates, not for mr Sunny daze, Scheer the smear or the guy with a turban. I can't stand Scheer but I admire Michael Chong. ms May is obviously a very bright patient woman. Singh seems a guy good at selling retail party memberships..
Popularity polls and Party Whips seem in charge at times.. or 'war rooms' - live and robo call swarming, media posturing and preening. I have lots to say on this matter.. but wish someone could put the real poop - on a plate - for me other others to take a sniff..
The real poop is there, sal. But we do our best to ignore it -- because we don't like the smell.
If this carbon tax is to work as I understand it, it would mean there would be a tax collected on carbon use in a sense. So gasoline / diesel /propane / coal, etc. will all be more expensive and those who use these products, especially the heavy users will be out of pocket dollars that will be remitted to the Federal Gov’t. So there’s a built-in incentive to pay less by consuming of the taxed products and thereby emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Perhaps incentive also to replace fossil fuel burning whatevers with alternate energy sources, thereby avoiding the dreaded tax altogether. The winners in this tax collection side of things are those who use little fossil fuels to begin with, contributing little to the big tax pot in Ottawa. So now Ottawa is expected to use this pool of cash to hand it back to Canadians. So how is to be distributed? Equal sum to all Canadians, an average to Canadian households or something similar? If an essentially equal amount goes to everybody, then those who used the most carbon and paid the most dollars will be ones most “short-changed”, so to speak. And again the “winners” there too are the low users of carbon, the net ‘profit’ for them, the highest.
So it seems this scheme could encourage consumers to try to minimize their fossil fuel consumption / tax burden to get ahead, which is the general idea, right?
But then a lot of people have long commutes with no realistic access to public transit, a lot of homes are quite large and costly to heat & cool, goods need delivery, etc; so some folks, businesses will pay more and not get back from the feds anywhere near what they contributed. And then there are more than a few who simply don’t want to believe any of the urgency to reduce fossil fuels and hate any taxes period and that’s that. So yeah, these folks could be fertile ground for the CPC voting tent come October.
Also, I can’t see the CPC coming up with much in the way of a plan to reduce fossil fuels, given Scheer seems to have been pretty much co-opted by the Ford gang to come up with anything meaningful. Mac
Besides the tax, Mac, there's the whole question of building new infrasttucture to facilitate the consumption of green energy. We need a network of charging stations -- both at individual homes and in public places -- to fuel the new electric cars.
It's going to be expensive. And, for those employed in the old paradigm, the change will be painful. But, more than anything, the change will take courage and perserverance to see the project through -- something like building the CPR.
BC has had a carbon tax for many years. It hasn't stopped people from buying gas guzzlers.
The tax may be too low, Toby. We can argue about whether or not the tax is high enough to change behaviour. That's the main complaint against Trudeau's tax. But it's pretty clear that B.C.'s tax does curb emissions -- and it hasn't destroyed the economy.
Post a Comment