Tom Mulcair: Trudeau throwing stones on climate change from a glass house

Atlantic premiers have started to push back against the planned increase in the federal carbon tax that will hit their region particularly hard.  As the parliamentary budget officer (PBO) has pointed out, that tax will be costly to Canadian families. 

Trudeau, along with his environment and natural resources ministers, has been claiming that the rebates to families will compensate for the tax. The PBO has proven otherwise. 

There are different public policy tools that exist to try to deal with carbon pollution. 

The approach can be regulatory, with statutory limits and fines for non-compliant companies, for example. But that requires enforcement, an area where Canada has constantly fallen short.

It can also take the form of a cap-and-trade system that will actually guarantee a result. You impose a ceiling on overall emissions and gradually lower the ceiling. This compels polluters to either lower their emissions or be forced to purchase credits from other more successful operations. 

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As for a carbon tax, yes, it could eventually reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) output by discouraging consumption of fossil fuels as they become more expensive. But what we are in fact seeing is that Canadian families who often live in large rural areas, with no public transit, are simply using an increasingly large part of their tight budgets to be able to still get around. 

That’s where the plea of the Atlantic premiers has to be heard. It’s too easy to dismiss them as rubes who don’t get it. They do. 

Nova Scotia is a good example of a province that’s fought, with some success, to reduce GHGs. Premier Tim Houston is asking that families be given a break. Instead of granting subsidies to oil companies and handing the bill to Candians, Trudeau should make producers internalize the cost of their pollution themselves. It will eventually be borne by all consumers, but it puts the onus in the right place from the outset. 

We have successful precedents of achieving results on complex pollution files. What seems to be lacking today is the political will to do so again. 

Trudeau talks a good game but as both federal commissioners of the environment and sustainable development who’ve served on his watch have reported, Trudeau’s government has consistently failed to achieve the results Canada has promised. Now he’s telling premiers he wants Canadian families to pay the price first and foremost, not the oil and gas companies. 

Trudeau’s plan is largely modelled on a promising strategy proposed by two former Republican politicians (James Baker and George Schultz) that was backed by current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. It formed the backbone of Joe Biden’s audacious climate plan. Its key features were a very high carbon tax with rebates to families and offsets at the border to make sure pollution was paid by the right source.

Tragically, since Biden took office and before it could be put in place, there has been a massive increase in the quantity of coal being burned in the United States. The current U.S. approach is reflected in the hundreds of billions being poured into clean technologies and renewables. Their massive transition is on. They’ve moved on from the Baker-Schultz plan but we’re still applying our incomplete version of it at the expense, literally, of the average working family in Canada. Other than increasing tax revenues, there have thus far been few measurable results.

When acid rain was destroying forests in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States, it took visionary work by Brian Mulroney and George H.W. Bush to find a solution. One of the main pollutants they had to reduce was SO2 which, when combined with water, was producing sulfuric acid. It was literally raining acid on our forests. Mulroney wrote an eloquent article summarizing their approach. 

U.S. President George Bush gives a thumbs up while meeting with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in Ottawa in this 1990 file photo. The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand

Two seasoned politicians, one Progressive Conservative and one Republican, concentrated on actually achieving a result. The system they put in place compelled companies like Inco, as it was then called, to reduce their emissions; something they’d steadfastly refused to do, threatening to close down if forced. When it was going to be more expensive to buy credits under the cap-and-trade scheme, they finally relented and put in the scrubbers that would do the job. 

• Brian Mulroney praises Trudeau's leadership, omits any mention of Poilievre

It was the concrete application of one of the key principles of sustainable development: polluter pay. Had Trudeau been there, one gets the impression that he’d have given Inco a subsidy, like he continues to with oil companies. Instead of ‘polluter pay,’ with Trudeau it’s ‘pay the polluter.’ 

In an interesting sidebar, Inco now had huge stocks of sulfur that, it turned out, could become a new revenue stream. As Harvard professor Michael Porter had hypothesized, environmental regulation creates opportunities for greater innovation. 

When President Ronald Reagan learned about the hole in the ozone layer, he didn’t emote for the gallery, as Trudeau likes to do…he swung into action. In record time the Montreal Protocol was signed as the countries of the world came together as one to deal with an existential threat. Substances that were depleting the ozone layer were banned. They concentrated on achieving the result and succeeded. 

Sadly true to form, instead of achieving results, Trudeau has been weaponizing climate as a wedge issue against Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives whom he gleefully attacks for their lack of a coherent plan.

It is, of course, shameful and indeed mindless for a party hoping to form the government of a G7 country to not have a credible plan to deal with climate change. 

The problem for Trudeau is that he lives in a monumental glass house when throwing stones at anyone else about climate change. 

I had the good fortune to attend the conference that led to the Paris Accord. Trudeau had just been elected and in a moving speech, threw out his arms wide and proclaimed, “We’re back.” There was a lot of hope in the room. 

File photo of then Liberal leader Justin Trudeau putting his hand on his heart as he arrives to Liberal election headquarters in Montreal, Que. on Monday, October 20, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Problem was, when he came back to Canada, he said (far more discreetly) that he’d be using Stephen Harper’s plan, timeline and targets (and he hasn’t even been able to do that!).

That hope has long since evaporated. The increasingly testy responses from one of the best ministers in Trudeau’s cabinet, Jonathan Wilkinson, shows that his smartest people know they’re being asked to sell a pig in a poke. Wilkinson is not just a good natural resources minister, he’s a former environment minister and he can count. He knows the numbers don’t add up.

As the worst wildfires in memory continue to burn across Canada, our balance sheet for GHG production is increasingly in deficit territory. Since the Paris Accord, we have to include the C02 from forest fires in our filings with the UN’s IPCC. This year's fires won’t be registered by Canada for another two years (we’re very slow at reporting) but it’s already clear that whatever puny efforts Trudeau has put up, will pale in comparison to what’s just been released by these wildfires.

Instead of getting results, Canadians are being treated to a Pirates of Penzance sword fight between a posturing Trudeau and a disconnected Poilievre. Both have children. Both know well that urgent action is needed if they are to be spared the worst effects of climate change. One fakes it, the other pretends he can ignore it. 

Ironically, one of the most successful themes for Poilievre is intergenerational equity. He’s got a lot of young people agreeing with him that it’s unfair that they will be the first generation of Canadians to have less than their parents, that they’ll never be able to afford a home. Unwittingly, he’s using one of the key postulates of sustainable development: respect for the rights of future generations. Too bad he doesn’t know how to apply it. 

Sixty years ago, in her landmark book “Silent Spring,” American biologist Rachel Carson identified and explained the persistent and continuous poisoning of the whole human environment by pesticides. 

The hurdles she faced were similar to those encountered by scientists today who’ve tried, with limited success, to sound the alarm about climate change and its potentially devastating effects on the planet and its ecosystems. 

Back then, it was chemical manufacturers who led the resistance, with disinformation and deeply hurtful personal attacks against Carson. Despite their efforts, her work has withstood the test of time. 

Today, we know that the big oil and gas companies have intentionally hidden information about climate change even as they increased production and lied. Major lawsuits have been initiated against them by jurisdictions like New York City and California. 

Like the other serial liars, the big tobacco companies, the only way to bring them to heel will be to order them to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for the damage brought on by their negligence. 

Small solace, of course, if we don’t begin to achieve results now. 

At stake is nothing less than our ability to survive on God’s green Earth. 

A few years back I attended a lecture by Matthew Fox, an American priest and theologian. Fox was speaking on the subject of the environment and, particularly, on the importance of respecting God’s creation.

I have friends of very different political stripes. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is that many, if not most, Conservatives I know espouse deeply held religious beliefs. 

Maybe those conservatives should try to work on Polievre. If you do believe in a God who is the creator of heaven and earth, wouldn’t you also want to do everything you could to preserve and protect that creation? 

Over a few short decades, human activity has begun to threaten that very creation. As Rachel Carson so beautifully put it, we are running out of time. “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth -- time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.”

Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017