Watching the candidates for leader of the Conservative Party debate in Halifax last week was interesting. Thirteen out of the fourteen leaders in the debate argued against the implementation of any cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes, on the basis that the Conservative Party should remain against tax increases in general.
Quebec MP Steven Blaney said: “they say you can put the lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig, well you can add Green to tax and it’s still a tax. So no, there is no need to have such a tax in Canada…we’re all conservative after all.”
Brad Trost said: “taxes must go down. Taxes do not need to go up on anything, particularly not on heating and driving and lighting our homes”.
Andrew Saxton said his first act as Prime Minister would be to “axe the tax”. He did also say that he would try to work with Trump toward a “harmonized” North American solution to climate change. Of course, that may be trickier than he suggests, given that Trump often claims to be a climate change denier and is not known for pursuing harmonies of any kind.
When Michael Chong, the sole dissenter on the issue, pointed out that it might be more desirable to adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax model similar to the one that exists in British Columbia, calling carbon taxes “the most conservative way, the cheapest way, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, he was challenged by several of his fellow candidates.
Rick Peterson, for example, told Chong that the BC carbon tax is not truly revenue-neutral, because it disproportionately hurts residents in towns like Dawson Creek, who lack the alternative means of transport like “SkyTrains and bike lanes” that Vancouverites have access to. Yet this was an unsatisfying rebuttle even if one does accept Peterson’s premise that small towns should drive Canada’s tax policies, since other types of taxes could still be reduced in order to fully compensate small towns for any new carbon taxes they have to pay.
Kevin O’Leary, meanwhile, argued that carbon taxes are not needed because Canada’s forests mean that it is already a net carbon sink for the world. In other words, that because we as Canadians are blessed with forests that we did not build, we have the right to emit lots of greenhouse gasses from power plants and cars we did build.
O’Leary also argued that we should not have carbon taxation because Canada only contributes a small portion to global emissions. This same argument was also mentioned by a number of the other Conservative candidates in the debate, none seeming to be aware of the existence of straws or of camels’ backs. Yet not a single candidate seemed to think it relevant enough to point out the fact that, on a per capita basis, Canada has the highest emissions of any significant economy in the world, apart from Saudi Arabia, the United States, or Australia. (Canada emits an estimated 1.5-2 times more carbon dioxide per person than is emitted in the European Union or Japan, 2.5 times more than China, and 9 times more than India).
The debate drove home a certain point about Canadian politics: there is no way of voting for a party or party leader who is Conservative on issues like government spending but at the same time Green on issues concerning the environment. While left-wing voters are given at least one, and arguably three, Green parties to vote for —most obviously the Green Party, but also arguably the Liberals or the NDP, and certainly the Leap Manifesto faction within the NDP — right-wing voters are presented with no such option.
A Red-Green voter — a voter who loves the outdoors as much as he or she hates tax increases or having to debate young social activists; the type of voter that a character like Red Green would himself probably approve of — has nobody to vote for in today’s system.
(This assumes that Red is the colour of the Right as in America, rather than the Left as in Europe. I know, I know, Canada tends to use the European colour code, but I’m willing to look past that for a moment because I really want this reference to the Red Green show to hold up…)
This is a real shame, and not only because left-wing parties may not win enough MPs to enact Green policies on their own. It is also a shame because it might, at least in certain circumstances, be the case that right-wing policies would actually serve the cause of environmentalism more usefully than left-wing ones do.
Most economists, for example, would be in support of a conservative proposal to use carbon taxes to reduce other taxes such as sales taxes, capital gains taxes, or corporate taxes, rather than use carbon taxes to grow the overall size of government budgets as some left-wing leaders might be more inclined to do.
Trudeau’s plan, in contrast, which is to allow cap-and-trade rather than carbon taxes in provinces like Ontario and Quebec, and also to allow the provinces to decide on their own whether or not their systems will be revenue-neutral, most economists are less thrilled about.
Ontario’s cap-and-trade plan, for example, will not be revenue neutral, for a number of reasons including that Ontario is going to spend some of the revenues on projects like wind farms rather than give the money back to the population of Ontario in the form of tax rebates.
An even more pressing environmental issue than carbon taxes is animal welfare. It is, sadly, the case that the food industry in Canada tortures or mistreats tens of millions of mammals and birds each year, and that poor treatment of animals can be dangerous to humans as well because of the overuse of antibiotics and risk of poor farm conditions allowing dieases like Avian bird flu to spread. The environmentalist Left, however, which cares about this issue dearly, is not large enough to have yet made animal welfare a government priority. And some of the solutions that many on the Left champion, namely vegetarianism, veganism, local farms, and small-scale farms, may not be the most practical courses of action, even if they are the most laudable ones.
A more conservative approach, such as mandating that large-scale industrial farms adopt humane methods — the “large pastoral” approach championed by Canadian writer Sonia Faruqi in her excellent and hilarious book, Project Animal Farm — may prove to be more successful in providing a more effective model for animal welfare than would the promotion of small or local farms. Yet among the modern Conservative Party, the issue of animal welfare is generally not even viewed as urgent or worthy of discussion. If only there was some sort of barbaric cultural practices hotline we could call to report the Conservative Party for such a cruel negligence…
An environmental issue that the Left has been particularly negligent on, meanwhile, but which the absence of a Red-Green movement means that the Right has not at all stepped in to fix the Left’s mistake, is the marijuana industry. Because the Left has long seen smoking weed as being cool and weed prohibition as a bad policy — and, by the way, they are correct on both those points — it has for the most part turned a blind eye to the vast environmental destruction that marijuana production often causes. This destruction is actually needless in most cases: it stems from the desire among consumers for weed that is both cheap and blemish-free, rather than for coarser “shwag”, even though the former is of only slightly higher quality. (Read Stanford professor Martin Lewis’s article on the topic to get a fuller picture of this key issue).
With legalization impending, this issue should be addressed in government. But instead what we have mainly gotten from leaders like Trudeau is tough talk on the need to keep THC away from the developing brains of young adults. The truth, though, is that it would be far easier to prevent needless environmental destruction than it would be to stop students from taking drugs.
There is, finally, the issue of local pollution and quality of life. It seems odd that the party that claims to best represent salt-of-the-earth Canadians puts relatively little priority on maintaining landscapes that these same Canadians might otherwise be able to enjoy themselves. It would, again, seem only sensible that Conservatives should prefer taxing things like air pollution, noise pollution, and visual pollution, rather than taxing sales or middle-class income. That way at least Canada’s GDP can grow, even if its oil sands or suburban sprawl grows too.
The argument you frequently hear Conservatives imply, that the economy and environment are at odds with one another because eco-taxes would imperil economic growth, misses the point entirely. The status quo —the Harper majority government status quo — is one of medium-high taxes in general, which limits economic growth, and intensive resource extraction and suburban sprawl, which harm the environment. A Red-Green movement would ideally serve market-lovers as well as nature-lovers. Today’s Conservatives, in some respects, often do neither.
Who will lead this new movement? I hereby nominate Robert Herjavec, the self-made business mogul and surfer with Trudeauesque hair, who sits to O’Leary’s right in the Tank/Den. (If nothing else, a sharkfight between Herjavec and O’Leary could raise Canada’s profile south of the border). While a Red-Green Party might have little chance of electoral success at first, the creation of such a party by a prominent Canadian could help to chip the Conservative Party towards the Green. It’s time to step up and serve your country Robert!
Future Economics 