Opinion | Pierre Poilievre and Doug Ford are shrugging off climate change. Voters might be OK with that


MONTREAL — Against the background of the Ukraine invasion and a domestic cost-of-living crisis in the making, is climate change at risk of falling off the Canadian political radar?

If one were to ask the current federal government, the short answer would be a categorical no.

On paper, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is committed to achieving measurable progress on reducing Canada’s carbon footprint over the course of his third and possibly final term.

He has appointed an environment minister with a track record of climate change activism, and the plan Steven Guilbeault recently put forward is the country’s most ambitious to date.

But the plan only shines by comparison to the anemic or non-existent policies pursued by Trudeau’s Liberal and Conservative predecessors.

With time increasingly running short, it is hard to see how the federal government could meet its targets without a significant amount of heavy lifting both at the provincial level and on Parliament Hill.

Based on the series of reports the federal environment watchdog released a few days ago, it would take no less than a massive all-hands-on-deck national effort to achieve the objectives the Trudeau government has set for the country.

On that score, the political stars are aligning in the opposite direction.

Take the ongoing federal Conservative leadership campaign. A year ago, almost to the day, then-federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole crossed a Rubicon of sorts by presenting a climate plan that put a price on carbon for consumers.

O’Toole’s plan was too timid to yield efficient results, but it still amounted to a break with the party’s orthodoxy and a major shift toward a more consensual bipartisan approach to climate change policy.

One election later, one of the first orders of business of the leading contenders for O’Toole’s succession has been to retreat behind the party’s anti-carbon tax barricades.

Regardless of who eventually takes the Conservative helm in September, the party will be committed to turning back the climate policy clock a decade to the time when the last Conservative federal government treated a carbon price for consumers as an abomination and acted as a facilitator for pipeline promoters.

For the many provincial governments that hail from the conservative side of the spectrum, such an approach would likely be welcome.

As Canada’s two largest provinces prepare to head to the polls, the front-runners in Quebec and Ontario are anything but climate warriors.

With only weeks to go before the Quebec National Assembly adjourns for the summer and a fall election, Premier François Legault’s government has just presented a road map that would — at best — only get Quebec halfway to its emissions reduction target in seven years.

In Ontario, the pre-election budget presented on Thursday by Premier Doug Ford’s government featured little more than a mention of climate change.

What the incumbents in Ontario and Quebec have in common in the lead-up to their respective re-election campaigns is a determination to treat any climate change measure that could take a bite out of voters’ pocketbooks as a non-starter. So far, the polls suggest that it could be a winning strategy.

In Quebec, the Oct. 3 election is Legault’s to lose. The opposition is so weak and so divided that the Coalition Avenir Québec could return to the National Assembly next fall with up to 80 per cent of the province’s seats.

The only Quebec party that has seen a significant improvement in its fortunes since the new year is the pro-pipeline fledgling provincial conservative party led by Pierre Poilievre’s pal Éric Duhaime.

In Ontario, the Tories are also going into the election with an edge — albeit smaller than Legault’s — on the competition.

Meanwhile, an affordability crisis fueled by inflation has provided the federal Conservative party with an opportunity to reframe its long-standing visceral rejection of carbon pricing as a consumer relief measure.

The war in Ukraine is similarly allowing pro-pipeline advocates at the federal and provincial levels to rebrand their agenda as a patriotic necessity in support of Canada’s European allies, even though no project could see oil and gas flowing through new pipes for as long as a decline.

According to a Nanos poll released this week, the Conservative party has built a lead in voting intentions on Trudeau’s Liberals. With a federal election possibly as many as three years away, those numbers do not portend much of anything, but they do suggest the rhetoric on offer on the leadership campaign trail is finding a receptive audience.

If leading political actors in Ontario, Quebec and on the Conservative leadership front are willing to bet their futures on damping or shrugging off Canada’s environmental ambitions, it is because they are convinced that on climate change, voters — or at least more than enough of them for their purpose — they are not ready to put their money where their mouths are. And chances are they are right.

Chantal Hébert is a Montreal-based freelance contributing columnist covering politics for the Star. Reach her via email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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