Duller And Duller

If you're looking for rationality and consistency, don't look to Doug Ford. Yesterday, Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxxe left her job as Ford shut down her agency. Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Now, after savaging the economists who dismissed his false predictions, Ford has silenced Dianne Saxe, the environmental commissioner who spoke “without fear or favour” no matter which party was in power. But she has not gone quietly.

At her farewell news conference Wednesday, she warned of storm clouds amid global warming and a provincial chill.

Ford’s Tories tried to shoehorn the environmental watchdog role into the office of auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, but Saxe wouldn’t bite. Like many policy experts, Saxe has read Lysyk’s bizarre public critiques of energy conservation, in which she claimed it doesn’t deliver value for money.

“I do not think she will be an advocate for the environment the way I was,” Saxe told reporters Wednesday.

In an interview, the outgoing environmental commissioner said she met Lysyk to discuss the transition plan dictated by the premier, and came away disheartened by the auditor general’s narrow approach.

Now, Ford is going to court to fight the Trudeau government's carbon tax:

Ford never backs down from a fight, even if it means paying more than $30 million in legal bills out of the pockets of Ontario taxpayers to fight the federal government that also represents them. By withdrawing the province from its partnership in a proven cap and trade system — pioneered by Republicans in California and propounded by a right-leaning premier in Quebec — Ford forced Ottawa to act to pick up the slack.

Instead, Ford has introduced his own carbon tax:

Saxe has long argued that cap and trade harnessed free market forces to set a flexible price for carbon so that pollution would no longer be free. By dismantling it, Ford paved the way for the more rigid and costly federal carbon tax, while depriving Ontario of billions of dollars in revenues raised at auction to subsidize conservation (retrofitting buildings and bankrolling mass transit to reduce vehicle pollution — the two biggest sources of emissions).

Despite the irony of a right-wing government rejecting a right-wing remedy for global warming, the contradictions from Ford’s government are even more glaring. For all of Ford’s public attacks on carbon pricing, his government has quietly proposed to impose a carbon tax of its own on industrial polluters (who will of course pass on the cost to consumers, not leave it in their pockets, as the premier likes to say).

The only difference is that Ottawa will rebate most of the revenues to consumers at tax time (an average of $300 a year per household), while Ontario’s Tories will funnel the money into a fund for industrial polluters. Ford loves to attack the federal tax as a “cash grab,” yet never acknowledges that it is at least revenue neutral (or even cash-positive for people who reduce fossil fuel consumption, leaving more money in their pockets).

Which is why Ford isn’t truly axing the tax, merely sacking Saxe. But his zigzags come at at a cost.

Ford’s irrationality and inconsistency have made life utterly unpredictable for the private sector, which seeks only certainty from the province: Ontario businesses have been forced to sign up for cap and trade, then wind it down, then comply with a federal carbon tax, and now prepare for Ford’s alternative industrial tax — while Ford rips up signed energy contracts and proclaims fidelity to free enterprise principles in the same breath.

That's our premier. He's never been very bright. But, as he ages, he gets duller and duller.

Image: The Nationalist Party of Canada