Go figure, after posting yesterday about how the Conservative Party of Canada voted not to believe in climate change the Leader of the party has actually introduced a climate change plan that can actually be called a plan. It is nice to see that they are at least making an effort.
Watching social media we can already see the policy wonks analyzing the merits and demerits of the plan but most of that will not go much farther than those policy wonks.
The Conservatives have two main problems for their plan. First, it is not a stand-alone document. It will be compared to the current policies of the Liberal government and there will be one issue that will make this plan dead on arrival as a result, namely the Conservative plan to take the revenues from a carbon levy and put it into green savings accounts. For the last few years the Conservatives and their apologists in the media have been attacking the "carbon tax" while completely ignoring the rebates that come along with it. Now that the Conservatives have introduced the idea of green savings accounts the tax rebates of the current system will be highlighted and in a head-to-head matchup between the two, among the non-aligned voters in the areas of the country where the Conservatives need to make gains, the current system will triumph. Really, for the average person the choice between receiving money that you can spend as you wish or having money put into an account, on your behalf, but for which you can only spend on certain things is no contest. They will take the money and run. And that is leaving aside the Conservative plan to have a private sector organization collect the funds and administer these green savings accounts instead of a government department or agency, which will raise alot a red flags among non-aligned Canadians.
The second problem for the Conservatives is the majority of their membership voted against believing in climate change and the need to address it. That fact will provide Conservative opponents with what they need to question whether this new plan would ever be implemented if the Conservatives ever won an election. Would a Conservative PM actually defy the membership of his party? Will he break the promise to eliminate the "carbon tax" after all of these years or will he keep that promise and break the promises in this new Climate Change Plan? Again, looking at social media we are already seeing a bit of a backlash among conservatives to this plan and their opponents are claiming the Conservatives have flip-flopped.
These two issues are going to make the Conservative plan difficult to sell to both audiences. Conservatives will not like the acceptance of a price on carbon after fighting against it for all of these years and non-Conservatives are going to have a hard time believing that a Conservative government would follow through on this plan, assuming non-Conservatives decided they liked it better than the current system.
Looking at the Conservative plan they have accepted the targets outlined in the current government policy. There are some differences on how the Conservatives would address large emitters of GHG but the differences are not earth shattering. The key difference is the amount of the carbon levy and how to handle returning those funds to Canadians. Their plan for those funds is a likely non-starter for those Canadians that they need to convince which would make this plan not worth the paper it is written on. Really, what the Conservatives should have done was state that they fought the good fight against the "carbon tax" but with the recent SCC decision they have concluded that there is no point continuing it further. They then could have stated that they would no longer move to repeal it if they won government. That would have neutralized the issue as something that could hurt them among urban and suburban Canadians without providing their opponents with something to snipe at.
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