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Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s long-awaited climate change plan means the Tories will now join Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in lying through their teeth leading up to the Oct. 21 election.
Scheer’s 60-page plan released Wednesday, which does not include a carbon tax, says the greenhouse gas reduction targets agreed to by Trudeau under the Paris climate accord in 2015, “are Conservative targets and our plan will give Canada the best chance at reaching them.”
Scheer has to say that because Trudeau’s targets used to be Stephen Harper’s targets and Scheer previously said he supports the Paris accord.
But in the real world Scheer’s plan, containing 50 initiatives, has as much chance of hitting the Paris targets as Trudeau’s, meaning somewhere between slim and none and slim just left town.
This as evidenced by the fact Scheer’s plan contains no timeline or deadlines for actually achieving the Paris target of reducing our emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.
That means Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna will spend the election denouncing Scheer for not having a plan to meet the Paris targets.
Of course, they will ignore the fact the federal environment commissioner, nine of 10 provincial auditors general, the United Nations, the federal government’s own studies and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, say the same thing about Trudeau’s plan.
That said, Scheer is offering a much more positive self-image to Canadians on climate change, portraying us as world leaders in environmentalism.
This as opposed to Trudeau, McKenna and Co. who are forever berating Canadians who don’t agree with their carbon tax as climate deniers and planet destroyers, as if everyone in the country has an oil derrick in their backyard.
While McKenna praises China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, as the global leader in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels — overlooking the inconvenient truth that it uses dirty, coal-powered electricity to do it — Scheer will be delivering a very different message on the campaign trail.
“We don’t do the world any favours,” Scheer said Wednesday, “by driving investment and jobs away from Canada, where energy is cleaner and environmental standards are higher, and into the welcoming arms of countries with dirtier sources of energy and lower environmental standards.”
Instead, Scheer argues, Canada can best help to lower global emissions not by imposing a carbon tax on itself, but by exporting its green energy technology globally, making a profit on it in the process.
That’s not an outlandish argument given that the most effective thing the world could do to dramatically lower global greenhouse gas emissions is not to shut down Canada’s oil sands, but to replace the use of coal to produce electricity with natural gas and nuclear power.
Indeed Canada, which produces less than 10% of its electricity from coal, as opposed to China at almost 70%, is a world leader in carbon capture and storage, as well as the development of non-emitting energy sources such as hydro and nuclear power and low-emitting sources such as natural gas, which burns at half the carbon intensity of coal.
What Scheer will have trouble countering, however, is the argument from most of the world’s economists and scientific bodies that the most efficient way to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions is through a carbon tax.
Albeit not Trudeau’s carbon tax, which is too low to be effective, returns the money to Canadians in rebates instead of more efficient income taxes cuts, and was added on to other environmental charges instead of replacing them, which is the way it should have been done.
That said, Scheer’s plan, by imposing new limits and costs on major greenhouse gas emitters, will also raise the cost of living for Canadians because any climate change plan introduces a new charge to an industry that has never been applied before — the cost of emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
That’s because the hard truth is that when it comes to imposing that new cost, there’s no free lunch, for anyone.
