The Conservative war on irony continues

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 1, 2009 at 3:34 PM - 7 Comments

New to the inbox, a press release from the Conservative party expressing deep and genuine concern that the Liberals are too loosely throwing around the notion of national unity. The breathless kicker:

Michael Ignatieff and his team recklessly throw around the term “national unity”. If Michael Ignatieff had spent more time in Canada, instead of living abroad for 34 years, he and his team would likely be more careful about raising the spectre of national unity concerns so frequently and in response to so many issues.

Zing!

Anyway. So Michael Ignatieff’s been out of the country for, like, ever. What’s Stephen Harper’s excuse?

A new coalition, a different politics

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 3:55 PM - 33 Comments

It would be a stretch to claim that Gordon Campbell received much of a “mandate” in last week’s British Columbia election. With 46 per cent of the vote, in an election that saw turnout fall, for the first time, to less than 50 per cent, Campbell is the choice of barely one in five electors.

Still, it is triumph enough that he was not defeated. Not only were Campbell’s Liberals seeking a third term, an honour voters have historically proved unwilling to bestow, but as the incumbents in a recession-year election, they were fighting daunting odds. His win ought to make opposition parties in other parts of the country sit up straight: if they were under any illusion that they had only to show up, and the economy would carry them to power, they can think again.

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Iggy v. The Carbon Tax v. Russ Hiebert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:09 PM - 7 Comments

The Conservative backbencher asks a question during QP this morning.

“Mr. Speaker, our government has always maintained that the last thing our economy needs is a job-killing carbon tax. Unfortunately, the Liberal Party continues to consider this irresponsible idea. The Liberal leader campaigned on it during his leadership race and vigorously defended it as a priority of a Liberal government just last fall. Can the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry please tell the House how the Liberal leader’s flawed policy ideas risk damaging Canadian industry?”

Iggy v. The Carbon Tax

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:40 AM - 51 Comments

Michael Ignatieff talks in Kamloops.

“We took the carbon tax to the public and the public didn’t think it was such a good idea,” he said. ”I’m trying to get myself elected here and if the public, after mature consideration think that’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard then I’ve got to listen.”

Stephane Dion's secret agenda EXPOSED!

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, January 10, 2009 at 4:18 PM - 16 Comments

The carbon tax? It was a sop to big oil.

Dion v. Harper, Crack-up in the Commons

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 1:40 AM - 55 Comments

I’d read about the sound that comes from a boxing crowd right before a major fight, but I didn’t fully understand it until I covered a fight (Mike Tyson’s last as a professional, oddly enough). There is a barely concealed blood-lust to the noise that rises up—a palpable, common desire to see someone grievously injured, an anxious excitement at the prospect of what violence may unfold before our eyes. It was, in my single experience, legitimately frightening.

The cacophony in the House of Commons this afternoon wasn’t quite like that. But that this afternoon was even vaguely reminiscent of that sound is probably enough to conclude that we are now in a dark, and perhaps dangerous, place.

“It was a fine day to be a parliamentarian,” Chuck Strahl said afterwards, selflessly surrendering his claim to be among the reasonable members of this government. Continue…

Megapundit: Aftershocks from the blowback of the tsunami

By selley - Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 3:08 PM - 4 Comments

Must-reads: Don Macpherson on Mario Dumont; Murray Campbell on how politicians shouldn’t deal with gun violence.

Shuffling towards liberty
Who will be in Stephen Harper’s new cabinet? And will they be allowed to speak?

Sun Media’s Greg Weston believes it’s “safe to say that [PMO communications director Kory] Teneycke has achieved more for his boss through improved relations with the national press in three months than his predecessor did in three years,” and he suspects that newfound spirit of (more) openness will translate into Harper’s new cabinet as well. It’s not just that the PM is softening up, of course. Part of it, an unnamed insider tells Weston, is that his ministers simply have more experience. So those who “know how to conduct themselves and their office,” in the insider’s words, will have more wiggle room. Implicit in that statement, it seems to us, is that there will still be ministers who don’t know how to conduct themselves and their offices. We can’t wait to find out who they are.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin says Jim Flaherty is a lock to stay at finance and wear the goat horns for what seems sure to be a significant deficit. Continuity is a good thing in troubled times, he argues, but it’s also just desserts, since Flaherty’s the one who “whittled down the inherited Liberal surplus to where he sits now on the film of a bursting fiscal bubble.” Harper himself “is notorious for calling the shots,” of course, so Flaherty may not be entirely to blame. But given his “quibble-worthy performance” overall—notably slagging off Ontario repeatedly, apparently just to satisfy a personal grudge—it’s difficult to muster much sympathy for the guy.

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Megapundit: Sticking it to the Ayatollah

By selley - Monday, October 27, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 29 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on Nazanin Afshin-Jam; David Olive and Greg Weston on tough economic times; Scott Taylor, off to the Caucasus; Haroon Siddiqui on the Iacobucci inquiry; Dan Gardner on ending the oil addiction; Barbara Yaffe on Bloc Québécois fundraising.

About those election promises…
Prepare to be disappointed for your own good.

The Toronto Star‘s David Olive observes the “awkwardly choreographed dance” currently being performed by the prime minister and the provincial premiers on the matter of deficit financing, whether it’s necessary and who should be blamed for it if it is. “It’s not just that if a swimming pool somewhere has to be closed next year, the premiers want Ottawa to wear it,” he writes. “They also want Ottawa to speed up its spending on job-creating infrastructure projects for which the premiers and territorial leaders could claim some credit when the unemployed start pounding on the doors of legislatures from Charlottetown to Victoria.”

So long as deficits are short term and exist only when times demand them, The Globe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson says there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. But as a habit, they’re a ruinous addiction that’s incredibly hard to break. Consult Hansard from the 1980s and you’ll find “Liberal and NDP MPs … predicting that any attempts at fiscal prudence would result in tens of thousands of people becoming unemployed, communities being crushed, grim fates awaiting millions of vulnerable people,” says Simpson. As such, it would behove the Tories to ditch as many useless, costly election promises as they can—he suggests the two-cent cut to the diesel excise tax and the $5,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers—before they’re forced to ditch the one about never running a deficit.

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The Green Shift that might have been

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 4:41 PM - 144 Comments

The instant, universal wisdom after the election — the more instant, the more universal, as always — was that the Green Shift was second only to Stephane Dion as a Liberal vote-killer.

Dion’s failings as leader are not in dispute here. And the Green Shift, as written, plainly failed to catch fire. You can’t argue with a popular vote of 26%. 

But if the argument is that any plan that involves shifting the burden of taxation from income taxes to carbon taxes is unsaleable, that has not been established. 

Why didn’t this Green Shift work, this time? A number of factors came into play:

1) Dion. The best product in the world still needs a good salesman. A complicated new product needs a really good salesman. Dion did not sell this at all well.

2) Timing. The policy was put forward at a time of skyrocketing oil prices. That doesn’t negate its usefulness as policy, as I’ve explained elsewhere, but it did make it a harder sell with the public. 

The credit crisis, erupting in the middle of the election campaign, made matters worse, adding seeming weight to the Conservatives’ message that now was not the time for “risky” experiments. Again, there wasn’t much substantive validity to this — not least since the Conservatives’ own cap-and-trade plan is just as costly, and twice as risky — but it sounded persuasive.

3) The NDP. Had the Tories been the only one demagoguing the issue, pretending that a carbon tax would be added to consumer prices but the costs of complying with cap-and-trade would not, the Liberals might have been able to make their case. But with the NDP as the Conservatives’ wingmen, it was no contest.

4) Most important, they botched the specifics. They lost their nerve; they tried to make the plan do too much at one go; they listened to the old pros who told them to use the money to pay off traditional Liberal constituencies, rather than just cut taxes. In sum, it wasn’t a tax shift, or not enough of one. Continue…

Megapundit: The age of meritocracy

By selley - Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 1:57 PM - 26 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on the end of capitalism; Don Martin and Janet Bagnall on gender politics.

The long and winding road
From racial politics to gender politics to regional politics to carbon taxation to the resurrection of the Liberal party.

Why, George Jonas asks in the National Post, would Barack Obama declare himself honoured and humbled at the support of Colin Powell when, “in theory, [he] stands against everything Powell has stood for, from party affiliation to policy”? Because “these days descent trumps ideas,” he answers—yes, he’s going there, and unencumbered by any evidence we can detect. “In periods of tribal reversion it matters less, say, that Powell, a Republican, has been pivotal to an Iraq policy that Obama, a Democrat, has been running and railing against, than that they’re both African-Americans.” Actually, scratch that, he does have evidence—only it’s to the contrary, namely his “fascination” with John McCain’s loss of momentum among women even after he brought Sarah Palin aboard.

Janet Bagnall‘s latest philippic in the Montreal Gazette against the Palin phenomenon is one of the more coherent arguments we’ve read that her selection wasn’t just an isolated and regrettable political incident but an actual step backwards for women in politics. If, as has been suggested, “her real appeal was her malleability”—if she offered herself to the GOP as “an empty vessel into which America’s most right-wing conservatives have poured their tired old policies”—then her candidacy can legitimately be seen as a victory for “unreconstructed tokenism.” If she didn’t, of course, then the whole argument kind of falls apart. And, frankly, we still don’t see any logical reason Palin should impact the fortunes of accomplished, capable women in politics.

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Megapundit: Stephen Harper and his "Marie Antoinette insouciance"

By selley - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 4:11 PM - 15 Comments

Must-reads: Greg Weston, John Ivison and Chantal Hébert recap election night.

Booooooooo!
If anyone’s happy about what went on last night, we haven’t found them.

The National Post‘s John Ivison says Stéphane Dion “has no ability to subject others to his will; no capacity for calculating the resistance and prejudice his ideas might generate; and, no sense of how to turn complicated events to his own advantage.” Sounds about right to us. In the past tense, it might make a fitting epitaph. Perhaps Winston Churchill could have sold the Green Shift to Canadians, Ivison suggests, but not Dion. (Trippy. We dreamed about Churchill pitching the Green Shift last night!)

On the bright side for the Liberals, Don Macpherson notes in the Montreal Gazette, “the distribution of seats in the next Parliament is such that the Conservatives can’t be defeated on a confidence vote until [they] are ready to do so.” As for the dark side… well, y’all know what the dark side is already, right?

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Can The Green Shift Work?

By Alex Shimo - Friday, October 10, 2008 at 12:26 PM - 0 Comments

The Pembina Institute, one of Canada’s leading environmental think tanks, has just released their analysis of the political parties’ green plans. You can find it here.

To sum up, it says The New Democrat’s green plan is a little ambitious, and it’s essentially a tax hike, since it’s not revenue neutral. (The money goes towards green technology, rather than lowering income and business taxes.) The Green Plan is the most strict, with emissions priced at $50 per tonne. The Conservative plan is complicated, and will allow overall emissions to rise: it allows emissions from the Alberta Tar sands to triple over the next decade. By contrast, Continue…

Don't do as I don't say, do as I don't do

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 7:16 PM - 30 Comments

In my other piece this week, I discover to my shock and horror that Stephen Harper also has a risky scheme to tax everything — or half of everything at any rate.

It’s the Conservatives’ own green plan, the one they don’t talk about much these days. Nut grafs:

But if the question is which plan is economically “riskier” … the answer is clear: the Conservatives’. We know how much the Liberal plan will cost. We’ve no idea what the price of the Conservative plan will be. Well, we can guess: the government forecasts the market price of emissions credits in 2010 at about $25 a tonne, rising to $65 a tonne by 2018 — not far off the cost of the Liberal carbon tax…

The only way the Conservative plan could cost less than the Liberal plan is if it reduced emissions less. As indeed is the plan: while the Liberals also target 20 per cent reductions in emissions by 2020, that’s from 1990 levels, the original Kyoto reference point. The Tory reductions are measured against 2006 levels — 22 per cent higher than the 1990 benchmark…

Moreover, there is virtually no chance of meeting even the more relaxed Tory timetable… Simulations by Simon Fraser University’s Mark Jaccard… suggest current government policy would result in reductions of about 120 Mt by 2020 from projected levels, i.e. from the levels to which they would otherwise have risen. But in absolute terms, emissions “are unlikely to fall below current levels,” meaning we’re on track to overshoot our target by something like 200 Mt…

In sum, the Conservative plan is just as costly as the Liberals’… twice as complicated… and probably half as effective.

Discuss.

Green? Who, me?

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 1 Comment

Toward the end of last year, the Prime Minister embarked on his usual round of exclusive interviews. The news was not good. He told the Globe and Mail exclusively that Canadians should brace themselves for the impact of pending federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, warning that “mandatory reductions impose costs. Those costs are real in the short term. There is no way to avoid them. None.” He told the Toronto Star exclusively that the implementation of the regulations in the new year would bring home “the reality that you cannot reduce greenhouse gas—you cannot mandate it—without there being some economic cost in the short term.” Similarly bleak advisories were issued in exclusive interviews with the CBC (“very real costs”), and the Canwest News Service (“there is no way to do this without imposing costs on our economy in the short term”).

Well, now it’s October, in the middle of an election campaign, and Stephen Harper no longer wants to talk about the costs of his environmental plan. Indeed, he never even mentions his plan. Rather, he wants to talk about the other guy’s plan: the Green Shift that Stéphane Dion has made the centrepiece of his platform. Or, as Harper prefers to call it, the carbon tax, ignoring the offsetting cuts in personal and corporate income taxes in the Liberal plan. At every stop along the campaign trail, he assails the plan as a “risky scheme,” a “permanent tax on everything” that would plunge the Canadian economy into a recession. At the very least, he suggests, we cannot take the chance, in a time of “global economic uncertainty.”

The message appears to have hit home. The Liberals have been steadily losing altitude throughout the campaign, and while Dion’s personal unpopularity is undoubtedly a factor, the Green Shift/carbon tax has by all accounts been a major contributor. More significantly—and remarkably—no one has thought to ask the Prime Minister about the costs, and the risks, of his own plan. It has become a cliché of political commentary that “no one understands” the Liberal plan. But is anyone even aware of the Conservative plan?

It wasn’t that way in 2007, when the Conservatives released, to much fanfare, “Turning the Corner”—a “regulatory framework” for industrial greenhouse gas emissions, updated in a “final” regulatory framework last spring. Then, the Conservatives were anxious that everyone should know about their deep commitment to the fight against global warming, previous efforts having failed to impress this adequately on the public mind. The plan would require a select group of heavy industries—electricity, oil and gas, mining, metals, pulp and paper, and the like—to reduce their emissions “intensity,” that is emissions per unit of output, by 18 per cent within two years, with further reductions of two per cent annually required after that. The goal: an absolute reduction of 20 per cent in Canada’s emissions by 2020, 65 per cent by 2050.

The plan has many parts, but at its heart is the notion of tradeable emissions credits. Or in shorthand, cap-and-trade: firms that reduced emissions by more than they were required would earn credits on the surplus, which they could sell to other firms on the open market. Firms that found it too expensive to meet their targets could make up the shortfall out of these credits. Or they could buy them overseas, through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. Or they could pay “contributions” into a green technology fund, starting at $15 for every tonne of carbon dioxide (or its equivalents) they were over their limit: a carbon tax, by another name.

But whatever the “compliance mechanism” industry adopts, have no doubt: you will pay. As the document puts it, “a portion of the costs associated with these investments and changes in operations will be passed on… in the form of higher prices”—just as the PM had warned. “Canadians can therefore expect to bear costs under the regulatory framework that are not trivial.” An accompanying press release notes this could mean “noticeable price increases for consumer products such as vehicles, natural gas, electricity, and household appliances,” adding “there will be a period of adjustment for all Canadians.”

How noticeable? How much adjustment? No one seems to know. To be fair, there’s no way anyone could. The final final regulations haven’t been released yet, let alone implemented. But even if they were, it is in the very nature of cap-and-trade that the costs are indeterminate. The price of the credits will be set by the market, in the usual way—by the intersection of supply and demand. A carbon tax is the reverse. The price of carbon is known in advance: $10 a tonne to start, rising to $40 by year four. How much emissions will fall as a result can only be guessed at—a point the Conservatives are quick to make.

But if the question is which plan is economically “riskier”—in the sense of uncertainty about its cost—the answer is clear: the Conservatives’. We know how much the Liberal plan will cost. We’ve no idea what the price of the Conservative plan will be. Well, we can guess: the government forecasts the market price of emissions credits in 2010 at about $25 a tonne, rising to $65 a tonne by 2018— not far off the cost of the Liberal carbon tax.

That’s not entirely coincidental. Remember that supply-and-demand graph from Economics 101? You can fix the price, as the Liberals propose, and let supply and demand adjust. Or you can fix the supply, as in the Conservative plan, and let the price rise. It amounts to the same thing. So you would expect them to cost about the same, for the same amount of reductions. The only way the Conservative plan could cost less than the Liberal plan is if it reduced emissions less. As indeed is the plan: while the Liberals also target 20 per cent reductions in emissions by 2020, that’s from 1990 levels, the original Kyoto reference point. The Tory reductions are measured against 2006 levels—22 per cent higher than the 1990 benchmark.

Moreover, there is virtually no chance of meeting even the more relaxed Tory timetable. The government itself concedes that, of the required 150 megatonnes (Mt) of reductions in emissions, just 60 Mt would come from the industries participating in the cap-and-trade scheme: not surprisingly, since they account for only a little over half of Canada’s emissions. The rest would be made up out of a grab bag of regulatory and subsidy schemes of a kind that have been tried—and have failed—before. Simulations by Simon Fraser University’s Mark Jaccard, considered Canada’s leading expert on the economics of climate change, suggest current government policy would result in reductions of about 120 Mt by 2020 from projected levels, i.e. from the levels to which they would otherwise have risen. But in absolute terms, emissions “are unlikely to fall below current levels,” meaning we’re on track to overshoot our target by something like 200 Mt.

In sum, the Conservative plan is just as costly (per tonne of emissions reduced) as the Liberals’, twice as complicated (emissions trading markets are, as Europe has learned, fiendishly difficult to design: just the task of ensuring credits are based on “real, incremental, verifiable” reductions would take several pages to explain), and probably half as effective. (Not that there’s anything wrong with cap-and-trade. But to get anywhere near our targets, we’re probably going to need both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade, as indeed the Liberals propose.) The Tory plan has, however, proved unassailably superior in political terms. The very thing that makes the Liberal plan less risky economically—the costs are known up front—makes it more risky politically. The Conservatives have succeeded in implying, without quite saying, that the choice is between a costly scheme and no costs at all. They’ve hit the political sweet spot: enough of a plan to say they have a plan, but not so much as to get in anyone’s face.

The Liberals have achieved the exact opposite (the sour spot?): a plan that is not radical enough to be the game-changer they had hoped, but costly enough to annoy just about everybody. True, Dion’s failings as a salesman haven’t helped. And yes, their timing could have been better, pitching a plan to raise fuel taxes just as oil and gas prices were setting all-time records—to say nothing of the turmoil now convulsing the world financial system. But the plan’s design was flawed from the start. The Liberals never have told us how a federal carbon tax would apply in provinces that already have one, while flirting, foolishly, with imposing tariffs on countries that have none. Most disastrously, they did not cut income tax rates by anything near enough to make a difference, economically or politically—certainly not enough to support claims of revenue neutrality. The tax cuts, such as they were, have long since been forgotten.

It should be mentioned that the Conservatives have had helpers: the New Democrats, whose environmental policy is a similar mix of cap-and-trade and subsidies, and who, like the Tories, have successfully demonized the carbon tax, while pretending their own plan will cost no one but a handful of “big polluters.” As Laval University economist Stephen Gordon has written, it is an alliance between those with “a visceral hatred of taxes” and those with a “visceral hatred of corporations.”

But it is the Conservatives who have been the demagogues-in-chief in this affair. Among the long-term costs will be Conservative credibility. The same Conservatives who have told us for years that prices, in a market economy, are to be preferred to regulation as a means of changing economic behaviour, suddenly forget their economics when it comes to pricing carbon. The same Conservatives who have long insisted that tax rates are critical to incentives seemingly cannot comprehend the logic of shifting taxes from income to carbon. And the same Conservatives who have long lectured us that “corporations don’t pay taxes, people do”—that any costs imposed on business will inevitably be passed on, usually to consumers—would rather we forgot they ever mentioned it.

Megapundit: Stanfield, Mondale, Stevenson… Dion?

By selley - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 2:22 PM - 12 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin on Gerry Ritz; Christie Blatchford on a drug dealer who murdered another drug dealer; Andrew Cohen on Stéphane Dion.

Counting on a miracle
Who will save the Liberals? Michael Ignatieff? Elizabeth May? Um… Gerry Ritz?

Let’s say the Liberals really are road kill on toast, Andrew Cohen proposes in the Ottawa Citizen—that, after the Oct. 14 debacle, they won’t be a legitimate electoral threat for eight more years, give or take. Not a happy prospect for Stéphane Dion, who has every right just now to feel a bit sorry for himself. But how, Cohen wonders, will history judge him? Well, he had the “guts” to fight for Canada in 1995 “when few others of his ilk did,” the guile to spearhead the Clarity Act, the tenacity to stand up to Paul Martin and the “reformer” instincts to advocate real solutions for global warming. Thus, while politically he will be included among the “failures,” he should rightly be positioned at the vanguard of those failures: Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark, Walter Mondale, Adlai Stevenson… Stéphane Dion.

Dion’s decision not to field a candidate in Central Nova also “begs for a chapter in the book on his leadership,” James Travers argues in the Toronto Star. It “infuriated Liberal loyalists,” cast doubt on his “political instincts” and gave an “upstart party” a somewhat undeserved boost in the national consciousness. But it could still “pay Dion a qualified dividend,” Travers argues, by allowing Elizabeth May to drag “the debates away from the tightly scripted Conservative message”—i.e., Dion will destroy us all! Run!—”and back to the policy choices that drew her into politics.” She could hammer away at just how conservative, and thus terrifying, the Tories are. And, in a best-case scenario, she might provoke the new, cuddlier, cashmere-clad Harper into a purple-faced rage in which, we imagine, he’d declare his abiding hatred for the environment and reveal the entirety of his monstrous hidden agenda.

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BTC: Substance

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

Philippe Gohier on carbon taxes and candidate vetting.
Colin Campbell on income trusts.
Andrew Coyne on the economy.
Scott Feschuk on killer robots.

Megapundit: Gerard Kennedy ruins it for everyone

By selley - Friday, September 19, 2008 at 2:19 PM - 13 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh on the economic meltdown; Chantal Hébert on Gerard Kennedy’s big mistake; John Robson on Elections Canada’s censors; Rosie DiManno on Jeremy Hinzman.

Wayne Easter’s revenge
Why can’t the Harperites shut up and play nice?

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin believes the Liberals got off lucky yesterday with Gerry Ritz’s gallows humour dominating the news instead of whatever Stephen Harper, who recently described a $9-billion promise as “mind-boggling,” might have said about Stéphane Dion’s $70-billion infrastructure plan. In these trying financial times, Martin suggests we’re less in the mood for twelve-figure “vote-buying tactics” than we are for modest measures like, er, cracking down on banana-flavoured cigarillos. Lehman Brothers and AIG be damned, we’d respond—we want good roads and kids not to smoke, and we won’t be convinced it’s not possible!

Sun Media’s Greg Weston summarizes Harper’s response to the Ritz crackup as follows: “While [he] may have insulted and otherwise upset the families of 17 Canadians killed by tainted meat under his watch, that ‘should not detract from the good work that he has done,’”. (We’re not sure you can really “insult” someone in a private conversation to which he or she isn’t party, and suspect whichever bureaucrat leaked the conversation probably took far longer away from his or her job to do so than Ritz did to make his off-colour jokes. But never mind.) In any case, says Weston, each of these ongoing Tory gaffes and the ensuing apologies “likely negates a dozen of Harper’s homey sweater ads,” and not only do they throw the campaign off-message, they force Harper to actually “praise the public service” in hopes of plugging any future leaks. Gross! Like kissing your sister!

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Carbon tariff: bad. Carbon tax: good.

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 6:04 PM - 40 Comments

There’s something to the Conservative news release this week slamming Stéphane Dion for proposing a “carbon tariff”—an import penalty on imports from countries that aren’t doing enough to fight climate change.

The Tories point to a recent OECD report warning that such tariffs, which are being mused about in many capitals, might start a damaging trade war. Why would Canada, a big trading nation, want to contribute to a wave of enviro-protectionism?
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Megapundit: Begin the thawing of Paul Martin

By selley - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM - 3 Comments

Must-reads: Jeffrey Simpson on Canada’s place in the world; Don Martin on neglecting Alberta; Greg Weston on Stephen Harper’s RCMP detail; Dan Gardner on cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax; Rosie DiManno on Sarah Palin.

It’s the economy, Mr. Dion
To hell with carbon emissions, the pundits declare, as their stock portfolios emit a descending slide-whistle sound effect.

This campaign is quickly shaping up to be about the economy first and everything else last, Chantal Hébert writes in the Toronto Star. Thus, she argues—apparently in earnest—”if the Liberals were serious about reversing the tide of the election campaign,” they would rubbish the “original game plan,” send Bob Rae and the lingering stench of his term of Ontario premier back to Rosedale and “pull Paul Martin from obscurity.” Not the Paul Martin who’s the “failed prime minister,” you understand—he can stay retired—but the Paul Martin who’s “the most successful finance minister of his political generation.” We’re sure Canadians, and especially the opposition parties, would respect the distinction.

“Canadians now face the worst of worlds,” Thomas Walkom intones, also in the Star: “stubbornly high retail gas prices (bad for consumers); declining wholesale oil prices (bad for Alberta) and a dollar that, while falling against Asian and European currencies, is still high relative to its American counterpart (bad for Ontario).” And that’s before world financial markets go pear-shaped, he notes, which they may well in the near future. What we need in these uncertain times is “a government willing to use the levers of the state (including, but not limited to, deficit financing) to shelter Canadians from the destructive savagery of capitalism’s dark side,” Walkom concludes. Instead, we have Harper’s “blithe” approach, which is, he says, “singularly unnerving.”

The issue of whether to tax carbon and/or energy consumption and cut taxes elsewhere to compensate or to institute a cap-and-trade system “shouldn’t be cast as [a] left versus right” issue, Dan Gardner writes in the Ottawa Citizen, but rather, according to Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, as “experts versus laypeople.” So why does Stephen Harper, with his master’s degree in economics, find himself amongst the latter? Politics, says Gardner—the same reason, incidentally, that Dion’s Green Shift exempts gasoline. The consumer foots the bill under either system, he explains, but carbon taxation is much more efficient at properly allocating the costs. The sole advantage of cap-and-trade schemes, meanwhile, is that gas stations don’t advertise the direct cost to the consumer on giant signposts.

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Black Shift

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 7:01 PM - 58 Comments

Crawl Across the Ocean asks, mischievously:

if increasing taxes on carbon and reducing taxes on income would destroy the economy, shouldn’t Harper be raising income taxes and slashing carbon taxes in order to create an economic boom?

Well?

A tale of two carbon taxes

By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 10:40 AM - 19 Comments

I imagine Stephane Dion spends a lot of time wondering exactly what went wrong with the Green Shift.  It’s not like he was wading into untested waters when he launched it.  When Gordon Campbell introduced a carbon tax plan in B.C. last July  he was  applauded for what was, at the time, considered a brave, bold move. This was a policy created by economists and approved by environmentalists.  Perfect for a politician  who wanted to show he was ready to move beyond pointless promises to meet long-term emissions targets (ie. Kyoto).

Gordon was cast as a hero.  But Dion, he’s mostly the villain. As this story in the Vancouver Sun notes, Conservatives in B.C.  are even being told to quietly support Campbell’s plan, while rejecting Dion’s.  Go figure. 

No doubt, Dion’s troubles have something to do with timing. He launched his plan at the worst of times, as oil and gas prices were in the midst of their biggest run-up ever. Still, an interesting case study of two politicians selling the same plan with very different results.

BTC: 955km in a rental car and what did we learn?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 5:10 PM - 0 Comments

For one, women seem to like Stephane Dion. Granted, this is a conclusion based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence, and relatively little of it at that. But pretty much without fail, wherever Dion was last week, women were the most likely to express their support. 

On the one hand, this might very well be a problem for a Conservative party whose leader has a well-documented problem with the female vote. On the other, there’s what one gushing woman said about the Liberal Green Shift shortly after Dion left her store.

“I think it’s good in purpose,” wine store staffer Susana Serralde said after meeting Dion and putting him on the phone with one of her friends, with whom he did chat about the key Liberal policy.

“But I just don’t think it’s going to be embraced by a large percentage of people because we are a car society, unfortunately.”

This is not the first time I’ve heard the “I like him, but I’m not sure anyone else will” lament. Its internal contradiction is rather obvious. But then Dion supporters are probably to be forgiven if they feel entirely alone in this world. Continue…

BTC: Transcription

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 3:59 PM - 0 Comments

As Paul notes, “fish or cut bait” is the headline—the Globe, the Post (whose Don Martin got the gist a day early), the Star, the Citizen all lead with the line. And as our astute readers noted, it’s a line the Prime Minister tried nearly ten months ago. And as I’ll note—if only to make myself somewhat useful—it’s a line Mr. Dion’s already responded to.

Kudos then are surely due to the Prime Minister’s braintrust. His new press secretary must be realizing the job is far easier than one might presume.

While we wait to see if the Liberal leader will re-respond to Harper’s re-challenge, conceivably compelling the morning paper’s to re-report the whole thing, a few notes on what was actually otherwise an interesting speech for the PM. Continue…

Megapundit: Free trade in chicken eggs or bust!

By selley - Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Jeffrey Simpson on trade hypocrisy; Gary Mason on aboriginal progress in the Yukon; Andrew Cohen on summer camp.

Bitch, bitch, bitch
This just in: we’re a bunch of protectionist, defeatist sheep. Discuss.

Jeffrey Simpson is back in a foul temper, and The Globe and Mail is better for it, we feel. Today he decries our hypocritical stance on world trade, which involves demanding “other countries lower their subsides and protection for agricultural products that we export … while insisting that whole sections of Canada’s agricultural market remain effectively closed to imports”—notably poultry, eggs and dairy, which are subject to gigantic import tariffs. Since there’s no political courage to anger farmers—particularly in Quebec, which benefits most from this “across-the-board, across-the-country racket”—and no groundswell of public opposition, Simpson says the only hope is that ongoing trade talks establish a framework in which Canada will simply be forced to change.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald‘s Dan Leger believes we’re becoming “a society of complainers and defeatists,” noting our fatalistic tendencies on Afghanistan (“we can’t do anything to help … so we shouldn’t even try”), law-and-order (“let’s just clean up the blood and punish the perps,” and never mind root causes), the economy (“we can’t stand on our own feet economically, so let’s shut our doors to foreign trade and investment”), and culture (“let’s just be tax-averse Neanderthals”). He concedes the media may have played a teensy role in creating this atmosphere, and rendering politicians fearful of espousing any big, new ideas.

Continue…