Canadian Legislative Issues

Though most Canadian jurisdictions still lack a formal carbon tax, and many will still oppose it in any form, a political near-consensus is emerging on the idea of putting a "price on carbon", the most common euphemism for a carbon tax such as the one that has been in effect in the province of British Columbia since 2008.

At the federal level, Liberals ran on Stephane Dion’s "Green Shift" carbon tax plan in that same year, and lost badly. Their main opposition at the time – the ultimately victorious Harper Conservatives – painted the carbon tax as a "job-killing tax on everything" and continued with this rhetoric all the way into 2015’s election campaign. However as of this writing, federal Conservatives were gathering for their first post-election convention amid growing support among delegates and party members to formally endorse the idea of a carbon tax as the most efficient and market-friendly solution to the problem of ever-growing greenhouse gas emissions.

At the provincial level, Conservatives once-opposed to carbon taxes are lining up in favor. Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown – a former member of Stephen Harper’s federal caucus – will contest the next election partly on a pledge to replace the governing Liberals’ hodge-podge of multi-billion dollar climate measures with a single economy-wide carbon tax. If he wins, it will be further demonstration that running on such an idea is not the political suicide it was for the Dion Liberals at the national level in 2008. The growing political consensus around carbon taxes, after all, is little more than a manifestation of the public’s growing concern over climate change and acknowledgement that some costs will have to be incurred in order to deal with the problem.

We’re a long way from a true national consensus on carbon taxes – or on any contentious political issue for that matter. But one by one, traditional foes of the notion that a direct price on carbon emissions represents the most effective tool we have against climate change are lining up behind the idea. It is likely only a matter of time before this growing chorus in favor of carbon taxes is manifested in concrete policies in more and more Canadian jurisdictions in the years to come.