{"id":226908,"date":"2021-04-14T22:13:20","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T19:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-best-climate-plan-for-erin-otoole-trudeaus-tax\/"},"modified":"2021-04-14T22:13:20","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T19:13:20","slug":"the-best-climate-plan-for-erin-otoole-trudeaus-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-best-climate-plan-for-erin-otoole-trudeaus-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"#The best climate plan for Erin O’Toole: Trudeau’s tax"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The best climate plan for Erin O’Toole: Trudeau’s tax<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n The best thinking in Ottawa, at the precise second I wrote these words, was that there will be no federal election this spring. Unfortunately, by the time I wrote these<\/em> words, the mood had shifted and an election seemed inevitable. The good news<\/a> is, at some point during this issue\u2019s tenure on newsstands and coffee tables, you may know how it all worked out. These are nerve-racking days for a pundit. I\u2019m much better at predicting things after they\u2019ve happ<\/a>ened.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m reasonably sure the matter of climate change is going to bring Erin O\u2019Toole grief. That\u2019s because it already has. The Conservative Party of Canada\u2019s national virtual convention in March was designed to present O\u2019Toole as the leader of a moderate, happy party. The party\u2019s leadership team skilfully blocked attempts by assorted immoderate and unhappy factions to get policy resolutions weakening abortion rights to the plenary. They paid no attention to the resolution stating that \u201cclimate change is real\u201d until a slim but highly entertaining majority of delegates voted against it.<\/p>\n

READ MORE:\u00a0Erin O\u2019Toole starts to define his conservatism<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Much parsing ensued. Nobody asked delegates to explain their vote, so we\u2019re left to guess at their motives. But some observers argued the party\u2019s problem wasn\u2019t with the reality of climate change, but with the bit of the motion that said high-polluting companies \u201cneed to take more responsibility.\u201d In this theory, the modern Conservative party doesn\u2019t deny climate change, it just denies responsibility. I wonder how that sentence will look on the side of a campaign bus.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Toole was left to deny some responsibility of his own. Conservative convention delegates? Never heard of \u2019em, he said game<\/a>ly. \u201cI\u2019m in charge,\u201d he told reporters afterward. The obvious question\u2014of what?<\/em>\u2014just kind of hung there in the air.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an ideal state of affairs for the Conservatives. First, open disagreement between the leader and a large faction in his party heightens a general<\/a> sense of mutual alienation. I\u2019ve seen this sort of thing before, when Joe Clark returned from retirement to lead the moribund Progressive Conservatives and when Michael Ignatieff led the Liberals. Party members aren\u2019t, as a rule, looking for a fight with their leaders. But, at a minimum, they want to feel that they\u2019re led by one of their own. If they don\u2019t, it saps motivation.<\/p>\n

Second, climate change isn\u2019t an accessory issue, or one foisted on Conservatives by me and my press gallery colleagues for sadistic kicks. O\u2019Toole actually gets this better than many in his party do, which is why he can\u2019t just campaign around climate change the way, say, Doug Ford did in the 2018 Ontario provincial election.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Erin O\u2019Toole\u2019s all tell, no show speech<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

People vote for all kinds of reasons: habit, fatigue, general perceptions of competence or honesty, hope for the future. But basically everyone who was used to voting Conservative, or tired of Justin Trudeau, or convinced the Conservative bench was smarter or cleaner than the Liberal bench, voted Conservative in 2019. There were more of them than there were Liberal voters. There just weren\u2019t enough of them to win more seats. And lately, the O\u2019Toole Conservatives are polling well below the Andrew Scheer Conservatives.<\/p>\n

How about the people who\u2019d consider voting Conservative but aren\u2019t yet planning to do so? David Coletto, CEO of the Abacus Data polling firm, looked at that \u201cgettable\u201d Conservative vote. In most of his polls, Coletto asks respondents whom they\u2019re planning to vote for, and then whether they\u2019d consider voting for each of the parties in turn. That produces a sample of respondents who would indeed consider voting Conservative but who do not, today, say they\u2019re planning to.<\/p>\n

What are those people like? Coletto found that, compared to current declared Conservative supporters, the \u201cgettable\u201d potential Conservatives are different in several important ways. They\u2019re almost twice as likely to be younger than 45. They\u2019re more than twice as likely to identify as members of a racialized community. They\u2019re far less likely to have a negative view of Trudeau. And they take climate change far more seriously. They\u2019re 60 per cent likelier to agree climate change is \u201ca crisis requiring immedia<\/a>te action,\u201d and less than one-quarter as likely to agree that climate change \u201cis a hoax.\u201d<\/p>\n

That list is trouble for the Conservatives. Quite apart from our main topic today, it suggests the greatest sin of omission in this party\u2019s young history was the decision not to replace Jason Kenney with somebody comparably prominent and industrious, or several somebodies, to be in charge of constant, empathetic and responsive outreach to ethnic communities.<\/p>\n

READ MORE:\u00a0Erin O\u2019Toole in conversation with Paul Wells<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As for climate, Coletto\u2019s analysis suggests it\u2019s actually not helpful to respond to the question \u201cWhat\u2019s your climate plan?\u201d with \u201cJustin Trudeau\u2019s plan is terrible.\u201d It probably feels great. It just doesn\u2019t move votes.<\/p>\n

So on climate policy, where does O\u2019Toole go from here?<\/p>\n

Political leaders facing big thorny issues typically go about their work in one of two ways. One way is to engage in magical thinking. The other is to do something surprising. Both of these approaches could use some explaining.<\/p>\n

Magical thinking describes what you hear from leaders when they promise, in effect, to make some annoying issue simply go away. It often works. Well, I mean it wins elections, but it rarely delivers real change. Think of Justin Trudeau in 2015 when he promised electoral reform. Parties kept winning majorities in the House of Commons without winning a majority of the vote, he said. This has to stop. His conviction started to waver when he won 54 per cent of the Commons with 39 per cent of the vote. But even before then, Trudeau\u2019s promise was meaningless. The various alternatives to Canada\u2019s first-past-the-post electoral system are mutually antagonistic: if you want proportional representation and I want a preferential ballot, we don\u2019t have two votes for \u201creform,\u201d we just have a fight on our hands.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other examples. Jean Chr\u00e9tien ran in 1992 on a promise to scrap the Goods and Services Tax. He would later claim he\u2019d been misunderstood, but his party platform was explicit: he\u2019d replace the tax with one that raised comparable revenues and didn\u2019t annoy anyone. There\u2019s no such thing. It was magical thinking.<\/p>\n

In Ontario, Doug Ford spent the 2018 campaign answering \u201cline item veto!\u201d whenever anyone asked how he\u2019d cut spending. It was Ford\u2019s way of saying he had no idea what he\u2019d cut. His obfuscation allowed him to form a coalition of voters who wanted him to cut everything and those who wanted him to cut nothing.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0The sense of urgency around climate change is trending up<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s tempting to want to fix climate change with magical thinking. For one thing, some Canadians, including a lot of Conservatives, think the whole issue is made up. Imaginary solutions to imaginary problems have a natural appeal. Unfortunately, just about everyone who agrees with the majority at the March Conservative convention that climate change isn\u2019t real was already voting Conservative, and there aren\u2019t enough of them to get O\u2019Toole elected prime minister.<\/p>\n

We know this because the Conservatives already campaigned on magical climate thinking. That was Andrew Scheer\u2019s 2019 platform. He promised to \u201cset emissions standards for major emitters that will lower greenhouse gases and drive Canadian businesses to the highest standards of green technology<\/a>.\u201d What would those standards be? Scheer wouldn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Toole has been sorely tempted by the path of magical thinking. When he ran for the party leadership, not even half a year ago, he promised to make \u201cindustry pay rather than taxing ordinary Canadians, by forging a national industrial regulatory and pricing regime across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Will<\/p>\n

Will O\u2019Toole follow Scheer\u2019s playbook or develop his own plan to address the climate crisis? (Sean Kilpatrick\/CP)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I will give you money if you can tell me the difference between Scheer\u2019s meaningless statement and O\u2019Toole\u2019s meaningless statement. My money is safe. There is no difference. This sort of language is appealing to people who hope climate policy won\u2019t be on the final exam. It\u2019s annoying to people who think climate change is a crisis\u2014the sort of people whose vote Erin O\u2019Toole needs.<\/p>\n

But wait. Didn\u2019t Conservatives used to win elections on empty promises to regulate the problem away? For that matter, didn\u2019t Liberals? Absolutely. What connects Jean Chr\u00e9tien in 2000 and Stephen Harper in 2008 is that neither actually intended to do a damned thing about reducing carbon emissions. But the world has moved on. People noticed all the years of doing nothing. They\u2019re not eager for more.<\/p>\n

So forget magical thinking. What\u2019s the alternative? It\u2019s what I described above as \u201csomething surprising.\u201d Every once in a while a leader decides to blur his differences with his opponents, rather than sharpening them. This goes against every political instinct. But it can be a means of stealing, or neutralizing, an opponent\u2019s greater credibility.<\/p>\n

In 1997, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wanted to end 18 years of Conservative government by burying the U.K. Labour party\u2019s tax-and-spend image. They promised to freeze spending for two years and income tax for the life of a first Labour Parliament. They had to stare down their own party to do it. For their pains, they created a comfort zone for swing voters.<\/p>\n

In 2000, seemingly worn out and beset by internal critics, Jean Chr\u00e9tien faced a serious threat from a young new opponent, Stockwell Day, and the newly created Canadian Alliance party. On short notice and for no good fiscal reason, Chr\u00e9tien had his finance minister deliver income tax cuts on a scale comparable to what Day was proposing. The front-page headline in the National Post<\/em>, a paper created to bedevil Chr\u00e9tien, was \u201cLiberals deliver Alliance budget.\u201d Chr\u00e9tien couldn\u2019t have written a better headline himself. In the election that followed, the Liberals won a larger majority. The Alliance never contested another election.<\/p>\n

READ MORE:\u00a0338Canada: O\u2019Toole\u2019s numbers sour<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 2006, Harper bought himself a bit of peace on international development by implementing the previous Liberal government\u2019s plan for a decade of ever-growing aid to Africa. He neutralized Liberal attack ads on health care by sticking to Paul Martin\u2019s timeline for ever-increasing health transfers. In 2015, Justin Trudeau took back family policy as a winning issue from the Conservatives by sweetening the Conservatives\u2019 child benefit program.<\/p>\n

Leaders perform the surprising policy swipe when they understand that they\u2019re in a position of weakness and that tinkering won\u2019t fix it. It takes a rare mix of humility and cheek to pull off. In effect you\u2019re saying, \u201cThe next government is definitely going to implement the other team\u2019s policy on this issue. So I might as well form that government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming from O\u2019Toole, here\u2019s what that would look like. He would promise to implement the Liberal plan to implement a federal carbon tax in provinces that refuse to run their own carbon-pricing scheme. He\u2019d sweeten the federal rebates that already protect most consumers from the cost of the carbon price. Increasing the rebate would allow O\u2019Toole to claim he meant it when he said he\u2019d have a distinctive policy that protected individual consumers. He might tinker with other details, but the gist of it would be that there\u2019d be no meaningful distinction between the Liberals and Conservatives on climate policy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t actually expect O\u2019Toole to do this. There\u2019s a reason why the surprising option is always so surprising. O\u2019Toole is likelier to replicate Scheer\u2019s losing policy than the one that won for Trudeau.<\/p>\n

Of the last eight federal elections going back to 1997, the Leader of the Official Opposition has won one\u2014Harper in 2006. Of the seven losing opposition leaders, only one\u2014Harper, in 2004\u2014kept his job as party leader long enough to contest another election. Scheer, Tom Mulcair, Ignatieff, St\u00e9phane Dion, Day and Preston Manning found themselves looking for other work. Trudeau complicates my neat chart a bit with his 2015 victory, when he managed to come from third place to beat both Harper and Mulcair. But as a very sturdy rule, being the main opposition leader is more often a curse than a blessing. This is a tough business. Best of luck to everyone.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the May 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cIt\u2019s getting hot in here.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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