When faced with one of the most ambitious environmental policies in history, Canadians will probably choose the latter.
The
luxury of Canadian elections is that they don’t matter too much. We are
embroiled in only one unpopular foreign war, our financial institutions are not
yet shattering under the weight of mass greed, our health care system isn’t on
the brink of collapse, and none of our hockey moms will be given the launch
codes for a nuclear armory. But the upcoming election, called for October 14th
of this year, has put one of the boldest and most important policy initiatives
in global politics on the table: the Liberal Party’s “green shift.” The policy
would make carbon taxation the principal source of government revenue. And
though Stéphane Dion, the Liberal party leader, claims the new tax would be
revenue neutral--involving deep cuts to corporate and personal income tax--the
shift would completely restructure the Canadian economy around its
environmental policy. Al Gore could ask for no more.
What makes such a profound change possible is that the
Liberals would only need a minority government to make it a reality--the Greens
and the New Democrats, the parties to its left, have even more radical
environmental policies on their platforms. Dion’s opponent on the right,
however, is the current Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party,
Stephen Harper, whose most important environment policy initiative so far has
been to propose reducing the tax on diesel. Elizabeth May, the leader of the Greens, has
called his ideas proactively destructive: “It’s not a climate change plan; it’s
a climate disaster plan.” The Prime Minister’s environmental troglodytism can
in part be attributed to the fact that he’s from Alberta, Canada’s answer to
Texas, which has been booming during the recent rise in oil prices due to huge
resources in its tar sands and its proximity to insatiable American markets. He
also clearly believes that, in the end, Canadians will choose doing nothing
over fundamentally altering their way of life.
But environmentalism is chic in Canada--with lush wilderness close
by even major cities--and it frequently ranks as the most important political
issue in surveys. In a recent study by Canada Post, our mail service up here, 75
percent of Canadians “consider environmental conservation and preservation as a
matter of personal importance.” Unfortunately, Canada also has wide spaces
between towns which require a great deal of carbon-based energy to cross. The
huge resources in the Albertan tar sands--somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5
trillion barrels of oil, much greater than Saudi Arabia--require immense
amounts of heat and water to refine. So despite our desire for virtue, we
actually live dirty. The central question of the election is whether our virtue
or our dirtiness will triumph.
Harper thinks it’s good politics to bet on dirtiness,
largely because he sees Dion for what he is: a huge liability to his party.
Dion may be an interesting and bold political thinker, but he is a terrible
politician, only barely fluent in English--a deficiency he attributes to a
hearing disorder--and despised in French Canada for his history of aggressive
anti-nationalism.