Climate-concerned Conservatives need to stop kidding themselves

Can Conservative thinkers convince Pierre Poilievre to take climate change seriously? That’s the question that centre-right website The Hub, with some financial support from the pro-carbon pricing advocacy group Clean Prosperity, is trying to answer. In the process, they’re raising some questions about their own approach to the issue. 

Hub co-founder Sean Speer kicked things off last month with the suggestion that Canada’s Conservatives “are well placed to lead on climate change,” which sounds about as likely as Canada's Liberals being well placed to lead on housing prices.  The Conservative Party, after all, has spent years vandalizing every climate policy the federal government has put forward, from the carbon tax to the Clean Fuel Regulations and the Clean Electricity Regulation. It has shown absolutely no interest in taking climate policy even a little bit seriously, instead pretending that we can either dismiss Canada’s role as insignificant (only 1.5 per cent of global emissions!) or use it as an opportunity to push for more fossil fuel exports (LNG, anyone?) 

There’s a fundamental unseriousness in Speer’s piece, too. He pretends federal climate policy in Canada is somehow driven by Greta Thunberg and her de-growth worldview, and the Liberal government would “seek to achieve our climate goals by accepting less economic activity, lower living standards, and even fewer humans.” 

This is a flagrant straw man he’s built, one that bears no resemblance to the federal government’s actual approach to climate change. It also buts up against the same conspiracy theory that BC Conservative leader John Rustad has mooted, which is that climate policy is actually part of an “anti-human agenda” designed to “reduce the world population.” This sort of silliness has no place in a serious argument, and it’s a shame that Speer even hints at it. 

Neither does the self-serving flattery that underpins the contribution of Clean Prosperity’s Ben Dachis and Adam Sweet. They seem to be bent on gaslighting Conservatives into believing that they’re actually the leaders on climate policy by invoking Brian Mulroney’s achievements on repairing the ozone layer, Stephen Harper’s reluctant decision to phase out coal fired electricity and the Government of Alberta’s supposed leadership on carbon pricing. “We need to take ownership of our many accomplishments and figure out how to take them to the next level,” they write. 

Alas, Dachas and Sweet give Conservatives credit for something they had very little to do with: Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system. “Under the leadership of PC Premier Ed Stelmach, Alberta was the first jurisdiction in North America to introduce industrial carbon pricing in 2007, which evolved into the current TIER system in 2019 under UCP Premier Jason Kenney….it has been so successful that it inspired the federal government’s own system for industry.”

One small problem: this revisionist history completely elides the existence of the Alberta NDP government or the crucial role it played in developing Alberta’s TIER system. I know because I was literally there, working in the Alberta Climate Change Office while this policy — then known as the “Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation” — was being developed and negotiated with large emitters like the big oil sands companies. That's the system that inspired Ottawa's industrial carbon pricing approach, and Jason Kenney and the UCP get precisely zero credit for it. 

All they did upon forming government was change the name, weaken the stringency for the oil and gas industry, and divert some of the revenues it generated to funding its quixotic War Room. “The change from CCIR to TIER is a transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars per year which benefits primarily the highest emitting facilities in the province, and a significant reduction in the value of innovative, emissions-reducing technology,” University of Alberta professor Andrew Leach wrote in a 2019 analysis. 

Finally, there’s political strategist Ginny Roth’s suggestion that what Canada really needs — and what Conservatives are uniquely positioned to deliver — is some “climate policy realism.” Roth suggests that Canada’s resources are more “cleanly-produced” (they aren’t) and should therefore be valued more highly in global trade agreements (see above). She stops short of explicitly arguing that we should be awarded emission reduction credits for our LNG exports (not happening), instead writing that “whether through savvier negotiations at global trade and climate summits, or through policy solutions like a carbon border adjustment, when it comes to climate policy, we must place some value on our borders and put Canada’s national interest first.”

What this needs, ironically, is a dose of realism. A carbon border adjustment is essentially a carbon price paid on imported goods with higher carbon intensity than locally-produced equivalents. Canada currently ships millions of barrels per day of higher-emitting oil to the United States, which would surely respond to a carbon border adjustment with one of their own. Unless and until Canadian oil and gas producers can actually start reducing their per-barrel emissions — and as the Pembina Institute noted recently, some oil sands producers are going backwards on this front — this would be little more than a self-inflicted injury. 

Don’t get me wrong here. I understand and appreciate the intellectual permission structure these people are trying to create for Poilievre to do the right thing on climate change, even if I think giving Conservatives undue credit for half-hearted work is not the way to go about it. But I’m reminded of that scene from the last season of Breaking Bad where Walter White begs the ringleader of a group of white nationalists not to kill his brother-in-law Hank. “You’re the smartest guy I ever met,” Hank says, “and you’re too stupid to see he made up his mind 10 minutes ago.”

The same seems true of Poilievre on climate. No political Jedi mind trick, no matter how well intentioned or executed, will convince him to see climate policy as anything other than another culture-war front on which to attack the Liberals. Until the remaining climate-conscious Conservatives are prepared to reckon with reality here, both in terms of their own party’s record and their leader’s most basic political instincts, I don’t think they’ll make much progress.