A Betrayal With Far-Reaching Implications

Despite the inspiring persona he peddled to win the last election, Justin Trudeau has turned out to be just another politician. As hard as that might be to accept, his betrayal of his promise to be something else, something better, is undeniable. For me personally, the sting of his failure to enact meaningful measures to combat climate change hurts the most.

And I am not alone in recognizing the fraud he perpetrated. Both The Toronto Star's editorial board and columnist Thomas Walkom offer lacerating assessments of the prime minister's perfidious antics. His most recent decision, to scale back the carbon tax, is emboldening the retrograde Doug Ford, Ontario's new premier with some very old (think 1950's) ideas:

... in scaling back one element of the national plan to put a price on carbon, Justin Trudeau managed to weaken an already too tepid program, and hand some provincial premiers — who are determined to oppose any carbon tax — more ammunition to fight in the court of public opinion, never mind, possibly, in the courts of law.

Emission-intensive industries that compete with companies in jurisdictions without a carbon tax, were already set to receive credits worth 70 per cent of what an average firm in their sector would pay under Ottawa’s plan.

Now, most won’t have to pay the carbon tax until their emissions reach 80 per cent. And four industries deemed to face particularly high competitive risks — iron and steel manufacturing, cement, lime and nitrogen fertilizer producers — won’t pay until they hit 90 per cent.

The Ontario government is running with this retreat:

Already, Ontario’s Environment Minister Rod Phillips is crowing about how this change is proof that his government was right to kill Ontario’s cap-and-trade plan, and right to fight Ottawa’s carbon tax in court.

All of which, of course, panders to a public that is far more eager to embrace willful ignorance than confront harsh reality, a hint of which was recently released by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which revealed

2016’s record-breaking year of damage caused by natural disasters such as wildfires, floods and ice storms across the country cost $4.9 billion. And that was just in “insurable” damage.

Thomas Walkom comes at this issue from a different perspective but with the same underlying premise, that Trudeau's weak carbon tax will accomplish little:

Before Ford became Ontario premier, Trudeau was in danger of being outed as a fraud on the all-important climate change file. But Ford is such a laggard in this area that no matter how little the Liberal prime minister does, he seems active by comparison.

Ford’s decision to challenge Trudeau’s carbon tax in court serves to obscure the reality of the proposed federal levy, namely that it is too low to be effective. And it allows Trudeau to continue pretending that his climate change strategy is vastly different from that of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — when in fact it is not.

And Walkom offers compelling evidence that the emperor has no clothes, nor any real climate-change convictions as he echoes the old Harper way of doing things, such as mirroring U.S. behaviour:

In 2016, he very publicly matched Obama’s decision to reduce methane emissions. A year later, after Donald Trump reversed that Obama move, Canada’s Liberal government quietly announced it would delay implementation of its new methane rules until 2023.

Last week, Ottawa announced even more quietly that it plans to ease proposed carbon tax rules for big industrial polluters in order to match the new laissez-faire attitude of the Trump regime.

But surely Trudeau's carbon tax marks a bold departure from American inaction? Well, not so much:

Ottawa’s fallback carbon tax — set to start at $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions next year and rising to $50 per tonne by 2022 — is too low. If carbon taxes are to work, they must be high enough to discourage consumers from using products, like gasoline, that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts I’ve talked to say that, to be effective, carbon taxes must be set at about $30 per tonne now, rising to $200 a tonne by 2030.

There is no indication that the Liberal government is willing to be so audacious.

Supporters of the Trudeau government will argue that something is better than nothing, and that economic realities constrain Trudeau's hand. The only problem with that thinking is that it is much, much latter than we like to think, and smiles, rhetoric and half-hearted measures will not slow the tide of the earth's inexorable march to a new normal, one that already is proving decidely unpleasant and deadly for millions of people.