Roundup: Scheer’s vague hand-wavey promises

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We’ve been through a week of particularly misleading rhetoric about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the impact of a $50/tonne carbon tax on the Canadian economy, where the figures about the “damage” it would cause to our economy supposes that the money collected would be either lit on fire, or given in lump sums to individual families rather than recycled in provincial tax cuts or other measures. But confident that it reinforces their narrative, the Conservatives have been parading it around as “proof” that they are right to oppose carbon pricing. To that end, while doing the rounds on the Sunday political shows, Andrew Scheer said that his party’s climate plan – yet to be revealed, but he promises that’ll happen before the 2019 election – will both meet Paris Accord targets but won’t impose a carbon tax. That’s…special.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/990706861056839680

Given previous Conservative positions on this, it’s likely that this will involve either magic, or some particularly onerous and costly regulations of industry that will simply internalize the costs (which get passed onto consumers) rather than having that cost be out in the open so that people can see it in front of them and make choices appropriates – you know, a market pricing mechanism that you would think a conservative party would favour over red tape and regulations. (This of course assumes that they are actually a conservative party instead of a right-flavoured populist party, which we know that they’ve become). They will claim that they had a record of carbon reduction while in office, but it had zero to do with their own politics, and everything to do with Ontario shuttering their coal-fired electricity plants and the economic downturn. Remember that their “coal-fired regulations” applied to new plants which hadn’t been built yet, and their sector-by-sector regulations were slow to roll out, and steadfastly strayed away from our biggest-emitting sectors, like the oil sands (which they still haven’t given any indication how they would mitigate their emissions without carbon pricing to drive innovation). I suspect we’re going to be looking at some hand-waving about future technology that will magically remove carbon from the atmosphere, but I leave myself room to be pleasantly surprised.

Meanwhile, on the subject of carbon pricing, here’s Andrew Leach to correct some of the performative outrage and bad economics that have been passed around in the past week.

Good reads:

  • Catherine McKenna says that relitigating projects every time a new government gets elected is unwieldy, while BC’s case is undermined by their own previous positions.
  • The government appears to be looking to social financing to help boost spending on social programming.
  • Because we can’t have nice things in this country, the Liberals and Conservatives are setting up to made gun control a major wedge issue in the next election.
  • The Canadian military is joining with allies to monitor that North Korean sanctions are being enforced.
  • The US has added Canada to their watch list of countries that don’t rigorously enforce intellectual property laws. (They may have a point).
  • Here is a conversation with Melinda Gates about the focus on gender at the upcoming G7 meeting that Canada is hosting.
  • As Tima Kurdi launches a book that calls on Canada to accept more refugees, emails show how photos of her dead nephew Alan sent bureaucrats scrambling.
  • Former MP Paul Dewar thanked people for their support following his brain cancer diagnosis.
  • Bloc leader Martine Ouellet will face a leadership review vote and referendum on the party’s mandate on June 1st.
  • Martin Patriquin finds the government’s approach to the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline to be the height of political cynicism.

Odds and ends:

Public Services and Procurement says that things are still on schedule for Parliament’s big move out of Centre Block this fall.

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One thought on “Roundup: Scheer’s vague hand-wavey promises”

  1. With regard to the proposed legislation on firearms, if the federal government really wanted to deter the ownership of firearms it would propose that since handguns are strictly illegal, any ownership would carry a minimum jail sentence of 5 years, any use in the commission of a crime would carry a sentence of 10 years minimum concurrent with the sentence for the crime itself. This would require leadership neither party wants to use for their own reasons. In the meantime handguns in particular are smuggled into Canada by the droves through a porous border and people continue to lose their lives. If there are not enough jails then ask the Aboriginal Natives to oversee facilities built on their lands. It would provide employment in construction and ongoing jobs for reserves that have no industries. Perhaps the convicts will emerge with a better sense of responsibility due to the more holistic approach that our First Nations would bring to rehabilitation.

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