It looks like Justin Trudeau’s consumer carbon tax won’t even make it back to the campaign trail. In his leadership-campaign launch in Edmonton on Thursday, Mark Carney did everything but promise to axe the tax … while at the same time, oddly, defending it. “Perception may be that it takes out more than the rebate provides, but reality is different,” he said. “And Canadians will miss that (rebate) money, so you need a comprehensive approach, you need a comprehensive plan.”
The rebates aren’t free money; the clue is in the name. Polls strongly suggest Canadians would rather the government not collect the tax in the first place than have it rebated later on. “Only 19 per cent of Canadians say they would never vote for a party that promised to eliminate the carbon tax,” Abacus Data reported in October, while “37 per cent say they definitely would vote for a party that promised to do this.”
On social media on Friday morning, Chrystia Freeland officially announced she was “running to fight for Canada.” Her people, too, have been briefing reporters that the consumer-aimed carbon tax is kaput.
“She is ready to make difficult decisions to meet our emissions targets and make sure big polluters pay for their outsized emissions. But she will not fight Canadians on a policy they have been clear they do not support,” a source told National Post’s Catherine Lévesque.
As if to illustrate the difficulty of defending the carbon tax after nine years of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister on Thursday declared himself “proud of our record of standing up and fighting climate change and making life more affordable for Canadians” — a typical non sequitur. The carbon tax was never supposed to make “life more affordable.” It was supposed to be revenue-neutral for the average family at year’s end, while making carbon-intensive products more expensive on a day-to-day basis, thereby influencing consumer behaviour.
The Liberals utterly failed to sell that to Canadians even in theory, never mind in practice, and it sure didn’t help that Trudeau’s personal travel habits evinced precisely zero genuine concern for climate change or for the day-to-day sacrifices he was asking Canadians to make. Once the Liberals exempted home heating oil as a transparent sop to Atlantic Canada, while leaving the tax on less carbon-intensive natural gas, the jig was up. They didn’t believe in their own policy.
Considering “Pierre Poilievre will take away your carbon-tax rebates” was a major Liberal talking point until this week, this is all a bit embarrassing for the party — or it would be were it capable of embarrassment. But it’s Carney’s and Freeland’s individual decisions that look the worst.
But it’s Carney’s and Freeland’s individual decisions that look the worst.
To be fair to Carney, he’s been whiffing and waffling on this question for some time now. In a tortuous appearance before a Senate committee in May last year, he said he thought the Liberal carbon tax had “served a purpose up until now,” but averred that “one can always look for better solutions, and as a country, we should always be open to better solutions.” (Such as? We await an answer.)
But when Carney and Freeland in the past professed to believe in consumer carbon taxes, I believed them. I think most people believed them. When it comes pursuing a “zero-carbon economy,” Carney wrote in his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, “one of the most important initiatives is carbon pricing.”
“The best approach is a revenue-neutral, progressive carbon tax. That is, the average proceeds should be returned to individuals so that incentives to spend on lower-carbon projects are in place but less well-off households benefit from rebates,” he continued. “The Canadian federal carbon pricing framework is a model for others.”
Freeland, of course, was defending the government’s carbon-tax policy until about 15 minutes ago.
Either they weren’t entirely honest before, or they’re cynically abandoning it now because they don’t think there’s any way to sell it to the electorate. They’re almost certainly correct on that front. And of course there are panic-stricken MPs whose support Freeland and Carney need to win the leadership and become, however briefly, prime minister — MPs who will believe their future employment hinges on ditching Trudeau’s carbon tax.
But whichever of Carney or Freeland accomplishes that mission will almost certainly then face thumping defeat in a general election. They will have accomplished almost nothing useful for their carbon-tax apostasy except to eliminate forever from the national discussion a policy that they support.
It’s hard to imagine that would have been worth it for their future careers or reputations, even if they could forever call themselves “the Right Honourable.” But of course, many politicians have survived far greater self-inflicted indignities.
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