Canada's climate plan survives legal challenge
March 25, 2021 6:10 PM   Subscribe

This morning the Supreme Court of Canada handed down a long-awaited decision, ruling 6-3 that the federal carbon tax - a key part of Canada's climate plan - is constitutional. Twitter commentary by Andrew Leach. The provincial governments that challenged it in court - Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Alberta - are rethinking their plans. Meanwhile, the Conservative opposition leader is still promising to scrap it if he forms government, and his party is split over the issue, voting down a resolution stating "climate change is real" 54-46. The legal battle may be over, but the political battle continues. posted by russilwvong (36 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
As people have previously noted, the Supreme Court of Canada's Cases in Brief is quite excellent and contains great (and brief!) plain-language summaries of reasons for decisions -- here's today's re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:31 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]




Apparently the anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition had sent a lot of delegates to the virtual Conservative convention (they claimed to have about a quarter of the delegates, 1000 out of 4000). They didn't succeed in getting an anti-abortion resolution put to a vote, but they did recommend that their supporters vote against the climate resolution: The science on man-made global warming theory is in dispute. Global warming alarmism is being used by global elites and the United Nations to advance population control through abortion and sterilization. This is most evident with the Paris Climate Agreement.
posted by russilwvong at 7:05 PM on March 25, 2021 [17 favorites]


It is tax time, don't forget line 45510, the carbon action incentive, which in Ontario is $300 this year, and in 2022 it "will be paid quarterly by cheque or direct deposit. The carbon price will climb to $170 per ton by 2030. That year a family of four in Ontario will get a rebate of more than $2000".

The most infuriating news I heard on the radio today was of someone saying they'd find a way to rebate people at the pump, (as a form of malicious compliance).
posted by ecco at 7:24 PM on March 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


I don't understand the electoral calculus behind denying the reality of climate change. Do the delegates think this is going to get the Conservatives enough votes to form government? I'd think they already count all of the climate change deniers among their fold already. Just pay it some lip service to give the anti-tax crowd cover to vote for you and enjoy those sweet suburban votes that majorities are made of.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:00 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


> voting down a resolution stating "climate change is real" 54-46.

Bad as this is, looking at it from the U.S. perspective I'm envious. If 100 Republican elected officials took a vote like this right now it would be voted down 100-0.
posted by flug at 8:08 PM on March 25, 2021 [14 favorites]


The difficulty the Conservatives face is that the more they try to hold on to the far-right anti-abortion climate-denial wackadoodles, the less the rest of the country wants anything to do with their party. O'Toole is in the unenviable position of trying to say one thing to his party members and the opposite thing to the public, and he's just not slick enough to get away with being quite that two-faced. One of these days though, the Conservatives will elect a leader that is slick enough - there's lots of young 'uns coming up through the ranks, and the more room the small-c conservatives make for the far right, the sooner they're going to find the tail wagging the dog.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 9:21 PM on March 25, 2021 [12 favorites]


Yay! The carbon tax is just a way to make sure people making a profit off of fossil fuels are also paying the cost of the mess created by fossil fuels. The cleanup is (at least partially) built into the cost of the product. If you don't want to pay the price of the cleanup, you don't buy the product. Of course people and companies would rather take the profit without having any responsibility for the mess. Who wouldn't? Sell lots of coal, take the money, don't worry about environmental destruction, the air pollution, the CO2 turning the planet's atmosphere into a giant greenhouse, enormous piles of toxic ash left wherever--who can resist making piles of money with no responsibility?

And one advantages of having all that money is that you can give lots of it to your friends in government to make sure things stay that way. Lots of money means lots of power. I remember when President Jimmy Carter called for a carbon tax back in 1977 (way ahead of his time). The industry went after him with a vengeance, which helped to basically destroy his Presidency.

Climate change is so much in the public consciousness nowdays that it is harder to get away with this.

Good for Canada!
posted by eye of newt at 9:35 PM on March 25, 2021 [10 favorites]


Bad as this is, looking at it from the U.S. perspective I'm envious. If 100 Republican elected officials took a vote like this right now it would be voted down 100-0.

Bear in mind the Overton window is different here. The Canadian Conservative Party is more or less made up of Blue Democrats in American terms, while the Liberal Party here is the equivalent of pink unicorns who fart rainbows.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:37 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


That vote is on a par with the pi=3 morons and these legislators should be ridiculed to at least the same extent.
posted by biffa at 3:02 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


Conservatives in Canada have been in a mess for decades. Mulroney managed to turn a massive majority into a fractured PC-Reform-Bloc mess that still hasn't been resolved. Both the Reform and PC fractions realized neither would win a majority alone so they cynically sacrificed their very real differences in philosophy in the hopes of winning elections, but since they have no cohesive platform they have no chance to win any national elections.

If the PCs had decided to abandon the west to Reform, and Reform declined to run candidates in the east, I suspect they might have had a chance to form coalition governments together. Instead, Cons support in the east is soft because the right wing is too nutcase, and Con support in the west grows more aggrieved and determined to become more right wing.

I really thought this minority situation would mean more advances for the left, as the Liberals would need to work with the NDP more, but even there the NDP has been ineffective. The gong show on the right means the Liberals are in more of a majority situation than they've ever been. None of the opposition parties wants an election they know they'll lose. It's crazy.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 4:14 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


only tangentially related, but I'm still patiently waiting to learn who O'Toole thinks we need to take the country back from. I am hoping it's the Conservative Party.
posted by hearthpig at 4:47 AM on March 26, 2021 [4 favorites]


Bear in mind the Overton window is different here. The Canadian Conservative Party is more or less made up of Blue Democrats in American terms, while the Liberal Party here is the equivalent of pink unicorns who fart rainbows.

Canadian conservatives are becoming less and less Blue Democrats as they are getting cozier and cozier with the Southern peers and adopting their rhetoric and strategies. Even the history may have been just a presentational myth.... Brian Mulroney did serenade Trump at Mar-A-Lago after all.
posted by srboisvert at 4:59 AM on March 26, 2021 [12 favorites]


since they have no cohesive platform they have no chance to win any national elections

We just had 10 years of Stephen Harper, not that long ago.
posted by rodlymight at 6:07 AM on March 26, 2021 [16 favorites]


For those not familiar with where Canada's political parties are situated, this NYT article is a pretty good explainer. The big change has been that the Conservatives, who 25 years ago were probably just a bit to the right of the "median party", would now be a hard-right party by European standards (though still to the left of the GOP). They've moved far enough to the right that the half-hearted, half-witted attempt by a former Conservative Cabinet minister, Maxime Bernier, to create a truly Trumpist/Farageist party, the PPC, has so far proved a dismal failure.
posted by senor biggles at 6:25 AM on March 26, 2021 [8 favorites]


"We just had 10 years of Stephen Harper, not that long ago." True, but since losing office, the Conservatives have suffered from a Harper-shaped hole in their heart. This is no surprise, given that Harper brooked absolutely no dissent and drove any talent away in favour of running everything out of the PM's office. Until they stop looking to replace Harper with Harper 2.0, and reinvent their party, they aren't likely to break past minority government status.
posted by senor biggles at 6:29 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


The carbon tax is just a way to make sure people making a profit off of fossil fuels are also paying the cost of the mess created by fossil fuels. The cleanup is (at least partially) built into the cost of the product.

For the purposes of this story, it might be good for people to know this isn't that kind of carbon tax. The taxes collected do not get used for cleanup or any other government purposes, they are given back to the people in the form of rebates. The key though is the tax paid is based on the amount of carbon purchased, while the rebate is more of a flat rate.

The idea was to have a financial incentive to purchase less carbon without having it be seen as a "tax grab", since if you burn less than the average amount, you would actually come out ahead of the game financially. Of course, it didn't really work, because right-wing politicians and media outlets simply don't mention the rebate when complaining about this scheme.
posted by FishBike at 6:35 AM on March 26, 2021 [7 favorites]


I am delighted by this, and premiers like Moe and Ford can cram it. Kenney, though, is in his own special reality: to him, the 6-3 loss is a third of the Supreme court of Canada validating our … strong and credible position.
posted by scruss at 7:01 AM on March 26, 2021 [5 favorites]


The Ford government has now wasted a lot of money fighting two legal battles over this. The other one being the fight over the stickers they wanted to mandate gas stations to put on all the pumps complaining about the price increases due to the federal carbon tax. Kind of funny considering their supposed focus on not wasting taxpayer dollars. And even more hilarious that the party that jumps up and down about free speech fought to uphold compelled political speech.
posted by FishBike at 7:10 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


I mean, you have to admit, that plan would really benefit Big Sticker. And think about who Big Sticker is.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:17 AM on March 26, 2021 [10 favorites]


Teddy Roosevelt?
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:35 AM on March 26, 2021 [6 favorites]


And think about who Big Sticker is.

Exactly.
posted by No Robots at 7:51 AM on March 26, 2021 [6 favorites]


but since losing office, the Conservatives have suffered from a Harper-shaped hole in their heart. This is no surprise, given that Harper brooked absolutely no dissent and drove any talent away in favour of running everything out of the PM's office

While he had power, I absolutely reviled Stephen Harper as a human being but I sure respected his political savvy. He absolutely understood how to play the divide-and-conquer game with the left (got the NDP and the Libs not playing together for a while) while galvanizing the right -- got all the wingnuts of the extremes and the more rational meat and potatoes types of the Tim Hortons (TM) middle to at least agree to not get in each others way. And yeah, those were ten long f***ing years, long enough to wonder if maybe the whole political balance of the nation had shifted. But in the end, it was mostly down to one guy imposing his will which, Canadians generally not being fans of autocracy, was not going to last. The sweetest part of his defeat, of course, was that it came at the hands of a photogenic heart throb type by name of Trudeau ...
posted by philip-random at 7:56 AM on March 26, 2021 [5 favorites]


When the sea of almost-solid red results for the Atlantic provinces came in on the night of the 2015 election and it was evident that Harper was already dead in the water...well, that was a nice evening.

I wish I could be more sanguine about the seemingly-dismal prospects of the federal Conservatives in the next election (not that I'm a huge fan of the Liberals), but in Canada all you need for a "majority" government is a bit more than 33% of the country concentrated in the right places (it would be karmic justice if Trudeau's broken promise to switch from the FPTP system came back to bite him in the ass). Fortunately for us O'Toole has the right-wing schisms noted by others in this thread working against him, plus he has all the charm and charisma of a green potato (although somehow he does a better job of seeming like a real HEW-MAN than any other federal Con leader since...I dunno, Joe Clark?) and sucks at social media.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:29 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


When the sea of almost-solid red results for the Atlantic provinces came in on the night of the 2015 election and it was evident that Harper was already dead in the water...well, that was a nice evening.

I remember the runup to election day where it went from "well, I'm hoping Harper is reduced to a minority" to "huh, it looks like the Liberals might win a minority" and then the Maritime/Atlantic results came in and it immediately jumped to "wow, this is already over and it's just a question of how big the Liberal majority will be".
posted by The Notorious SRD at 8:35 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


"We just had 10 years of Stephen Harper, not that long ago." True, but since losing office, the Conservatives have suffered from a Harper-shaped hole in their heart.

There is a 1994 photo of all the living former PMs, save for Mulroney for whatever reason. (I could have sworn I have seen one with Mulroney as well, but I may be imagining this. Maybe he doesn't get invited to these things.) I've always thought that their personal magnetism was directly correlated with their amount of time in office.

I've long been baffled that Harper, a man with a personality so bland and indistinct as to be basically absent, won three elections. The Tories have learned the wrong lesson totally from his decade: Scheer and O'Toole are both guys who come across less as a national leader and more as the assistant manager of a Canadian Tire in Bracebridge.

Note that it was not only the Conservatives who learned the wrong lesson: the Liberals brought along two colourless technocrats of their own with the Dion-Ignateff years. These two managed to be the first Liberal leaders to avoid becoming PM since Edward Blake, who had faced Sir John A. Macdonald last in 1887.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:30 AM on March 26, 2021 [9 favorites]


The Notorious SRD: I remember the runup to election day where it went from "well, I'm hoping Harper is reduced to a minority" to "huh, it looks like the Liberals might win a minority" and then the Maritime/Atlantic results came in and it immediately jumped to "wow, this is already over and it's just a question of how big the Liberal majority will be".

Plus Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP had won the Alberta election in May 2015, after more than 40 years of Conservative governments in Alberta. So there was a window of opportunity for a deal: stringent climate policy in Alberta in exchange for more pipeline capacity, especially TMX. Alberta's the province most dependent on oil and gas, and it produces a large share of Canada's emissions; you can't do much on climate without Alberta on board, and Alberta's always going to be reluctant. Notley took Alberta about as far as it could go.

Negotiating the national carbon price floor with the provinces in 2016 (except Saskatchewan) and then moving forward with both carbon pricing and TMX despite various changes in government (BC in 2017, Ontario in 2018, Alberta in 2019) and the 2019 federal election has been something of an epic struggle. Now the big challenge is to get political consensus at the federal level (like we have in BC and Quebec), so that carbon pricing can survive a change in government. In other words, what will it take to get the Conservatives to drop their opposition to carbon pricing? I suspect it'll take repeated electoral defeats.
posted by russilwvong at 9:59 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


Now the big challenge is to get political consensus at the federal level (like we have in BC and Quebec), so that carbon pricing can survive a change in government. In other words, what will it take to get the Conservatives to drop their opposition to carbon pricing? I suspect it'll take repeated electoral defeats.

They will never abandon repealing it because the nature of a carbon tax is to be ever escalating. Repealing it will be the first thing they do when they regain power so that they have their entire term to paper over it by stoking divisions, hatreds, and antipathy within the electorate.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 10:39 AM on March 26, 2021


The most entertaining illustration of Canadian political parties that I've seen is Nicolas Francoeur's fantasy-game versions of the political leaders in 2015. Here's the 2019 version.

In Canada, the longer governments are in power, the more they accumulate mis-steps and scandals, so they tend to weaken over time and eventually get replaced. ("Politicians are like diapers, they need to be changed every once in a while.") The Conservatives seem to have a floor of 30% of the vote, so my guess is that sooner or later, they'll end up replacing the Liberals. The later it is - the longer they're locked out of power - the more likely it is that they'll end up changing their minds on carbon pricing first.

Your Childhood Pet Rock: They will never abandon repealing it because the nature of a carbon tax is to be ever escalating. Repealing it will be the first thing they do when they regain power so that they have their entire term to paper over it by stoking divisions, hatreds, and antipathy within the electorate.

Thing is, the Conservatives are split on the issue of climate change, as evidenced by the 54-46% vote on the climate resolution. Eventually they'll get tired of losing.

Public opinion polls show that about 2/3 of Canadians regard climate change as a serious problem. 1/3 do not, and almost all of that minority are already Conservative supporters. To form government, they need somewhat more than that. So they'll need to appeal to swing voters, and their lack of a credible climate plan is a significant weakness. Not only that, as climate change worsens, it seems likely that the number of climate skeptics, already a minority, will shrink further.

People like Ken Boessenkool have been trying to persuade Conservatives that the shortest path forward is to propose a credible climate plan based on a carbon tax. It seems like Erin O'Toole isn't willing to go that far. Assuming he doesn't do a U-turn on carbon pricing, I think he faces an unappetizing choice: propose a weaker policy, as Scheer did, or propose an equivalent policy that will be far more costly.
posted by russilwvong at 11:12 AM on March 26, 2021 [5 favorites]


Thing is, the Conservatives are split on the issue of climate change, as evidenced by the 54-46% vote on the climate resolution. Eventually they'll get tired of losing.

Public opinion polls show that about 2/3 of Canadians regard climate change as a serious problem. 1/3 do not, and almost all of that minority are already Conservative supporters. To form government, they need somewhat more than that. So they'll need to appeal to swing voters, and their lack of a credible climate plan is a significant weakness. Not only that, as climate change worsens, it seems likely that the number of climate skeptics, already a minority, will shrink further.


Sure but climate change isn't a big single issue voter draw and conservatives fall in line by their nature. Think about all the "liberalish" Republicans that went from at least passably evil to off the fucking deep end with Trump winning the president. The craven will slavishly follow whatever gets them power and as long as liberals and NDP can split ridings. The nut jobs will be able to form government with the support of less than a quarter of the populace. It's a far right takeover that's happening alarmingly often in anglophone conservative parties. Keep the more moderate conservatives in line, keep the libs and NDP at each other's throats, and the inmates can take over the asylum.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:38 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


Both the Reform and PC fractions realized neither would win a majority alone so they cynically sacrificed their very real differences in philosophy in the hopes of winning elections,

The hell we did. When that deal was made many of us tore up our PC membership cards and left, especially at the riding leadership level. That initial departure of red Tories is part of why Harper was successful at installing his own people in riding associations, and one of the results of that takeover has been years of insane party policy votes like this one denying climate change.

I'm not trying to claim any kind of sympathy for being a former Progressive Conservative - god, is there a less sympathetic group on the planet? - but the absolute gongshow that is the 2021 Conservative Party shows that at least some of us old PCers didn't cynically sacrifice anything.
posted by ZaphodB at 12:44 PM on March 26, 2021 [9 favorites]


Jason Kenney says Alberta didn't prep carbon tax fallback plan, was hoping to win in court

"It was our hope that we would win," Kenney told reporters Friday.

Maaaybe they should have directed some of their energy away from attacking cartoons, but what do I know.
posted by rodlymight at 5:42 PM on March 26, 2021 [4 favorites]


"The Canadian Energy Centre says more than 1,000 people have sent an automated letter off its website to Netflix Canada to let it know the animated film sounds like propaganda."

They struck comedy oil right there.
posted by srboisvert at 9:41 AM on March 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


Maaaybe they should have directed some of their energy away from attacking cartoons, but what do I know.

TFW someone mistakes "carbon footprint" for "bigfoot."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:26 PM on March 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


I wrote:

People like Ken Boessenkool have been trying to persuade Conservatives that the shortest path forward is to propose a credible climate plan based on a carbon tax. It seems like Erin O'Toole isn't willing to go that far. Assuming he doesn't do a U-turn on carbon pricing, I think he faces an unappetizing choice: propose a weaker policy, as Scheer did, or propose an equivalent policy that will be far more costly.

Breaking news: O'Toole did a U-turn yesterday! He announced a plan that includes a carbon tax ($20/t rising to $50/t), with the difference made up using the kind of flexible regulations proposed by Mark Jaccard. Best of all, the CPC hired an independent consulting firm, Navius (which has a number of Jaccard's former students), to assess the plan. (Navius says it's strong enough to hit the 2030 Paris target.) Paul Wells, a couple days earlier. Aaron Wherry. Navius assessment.

The strangest thing about the plan is that it includes keeping track of the carbon tax that each person pays, and then returning it as an individual rebate that's restricted to "green" spending - buying a bicycle, upgrading insulation, saving for an electric car, etc. Seems complicated, intrusive, and bureaucratic compared to the existing policy (where the carbon tax revenue from each province is divided up equally and returned to households in the province). Jennifer Robson suggests that it's a somewhat half-baked idea.

Given that the Conservative party is divided on climate, I think the critical question is whether O'Toole can convince his own party to support the plan. Conservative volunteers who repeatedly promised voters that O'Toole would repeal Trudeau's carbon tax are not happy; it may be difficult for O'Toole to rebuild trust within the party. After that, we'll see if O'Toole can convince voters (e.g. commuters in the GTA) to trust him, and persuade them that this is a better idea than the existing policy.

Mark Jaccard's argument has been that flexible regulations will be less painful for people to swallow than a carbon tax. But it seems that O'Toole wasn't able to drop the carbon tax entirely.
posted by russilwvong at 9:08 PM on April 16, 2021


The O'Toole plan is a perfect "Conservative" plan. It's regressive (poor people won't able to buy now more expensive food with the rebate but rich people will be able to buy bigger windows for their beach house as long as they are energy efficient and poor people are less likely to be able to track their purchases and submit the paper work in the first place). The plan is complicated so they can change up the messaging depending on whether they are talking to oilpatch workers or Ontario suburbanites and they can blame government for the inefficiencies. It generates lots of business (and access to a free float) for finance companies managing the accounts. And it biases spending towards large businesses who can get their products classed as low carbon.

Finally it rewards the rolling coal set for buying the biggest, baddest, coaliest vehicle they can manage because worse gas mileage equals bigger carbon rebate.
posted by Mitheral at 6:55 AM on April 17, 2021


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