Come up with better ideas than carbon tax
If a politician wants to be remembered fondly after they’ve been relieved of the mortal coil, they must be courageous during their time in office: Pierre Trudeau, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney are all prime examples.
Given their cynical moves on Canada’s carbon tax, neither NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh nor Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will likely join that august list.
Justin Trudeau capitulated to pressure from his Atlantic region MPs and removed the carbon tax on home heating oil in 2023, making it a bit rich for some Liberals to call Singh “unprincipled” in the wake of his death bed conversion regarding the “burden” the carbon tax has put on Canadian families.
Whether or not their climate strategy would materially impact global emissions, both Trudeau and Singh could at least boast that their carbon tax was a plan of sorts. Even if I’ve never understood how their particular approach would change our behaviour, when Trudeau claimed his quarterly rebate cheques returned 100 per cent of the incremental cost that most Canadian Swim Dads or Hockey Moms paid to fill up their car.
One doesn’t need to be either “for” or “against” putting “a price on pollution” to ask this fundamental question: how does increasing the cost of fuel change consumption behaviour if the government’s intention was to insulate the vast majority of consumers from feeling any financial pain from their aforementioned carbon consumption?
Conservatives are told that they should favour a carbon tax as a political theory, but that’s usually recommended by well-meaning people who’ve never run for office themselves. Former Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown supported a carbon tax at his first convention as leader in 2016, while Andrew Scheer won the federal leadership a year later as an outspoken opponent of the concept.
That Canada’s share of annual global greenhouse gas emissions is reported to have dropped from three per cent to 1.5 per cent post-Second World War is a function of many things. What can’t be denied is that if Canadians cut that remaining 1.5 per cent share to zero tomorrow, some combination of China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam will backfill our environmental sacrifice as they continue to build new coal plants to support their own needs.
Billions of our fellow global citizens want the same modern conveniences and standard of living that we enjoy here in Canada. Until there’s a more cost-effective, environmentally-friendly and scalable source, most nations will consume carbon to drive their vehicles, heat their homes, and all the other things that we took for granted as Canada industrialized.
That’s our business opportunity. The 2050 Paris Accord ensures that many industrialized nations are going to spend trillions on products and services that are designed to reduce the world’s carbon footprint. Canadian researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and political representatives should make it our collective mission to do what we’ve done for generations: solve complex problems.
We can have a meaningful impact on climate change if we put hundreds of thousands of Canadians to work on battery storage technology, biofuels, carbon capture, geothermal, small modular nuclear reactors and all of the other tangible opportunities that could eventually become part of a national portfolio of Canadianowned intellectual property.
And when we do develop a potentially groundbreaking solution, let’s not sell out early, as was the case with Occidental Petroleum’s 2023 acquisition of Squamish, B.C.’s Carbon Engineering’s promising technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An approach that should be far cheaper than carbon capture projects and doesn’t require governments to put a price on emissions.
Not every investment will work, and some technologies won’t scale, but we have an unparalleled opportunity to develop, build and sell the solutions that nations need to comply with their climate targets.
That’s not up for partisan debate, and whatever the future may hold for our existing natural resources, our economy and environment will be better off if we rely on Canadian ingenuity and courage, and not circular tax schemes, to meet this global challenge.