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It is not Ford’s problem that Trudeau embraced the Paris treaty without a plan

In other words, when it comes to the things that truly affect peoples’ day-to-day lives, climate change might belong on the list, but far down. Polls show that people have largely figured this out for themselves, with climate change consistently ranking far behind most other priorities.

Policy should reflect this. It is not rational to say that, because climate change might (in theory) create some problems for people a few decades from now, we should impose energy policies that will create much larger problems for them now. Unfortunately, that is what plans like the Paris treaty oblige us to do.

It is even less rational once you realize that the policies are futile. The same models that say global warming is a problem also say that Paris-type measures will not fix it. If Canada and all the other signatories do what they say they plan to do, the effect on the climate by the end of the century will be minuscule at best, despite the heavy economic costs.

And, as with Kyoto before it, we can safely predict that the other signatories to Paris will not keep their promises. We especially need to take account of the fact that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of Paris has changed the situation for Canada. The U.S. is ramping up its economic competitiveness through energy-sector deregulation and an abandonment of former president Barack Obama’s climate goals. We ignore this at our peril.

Ontario energy and climate policy needs to be rooted in current reality, not wishful thinking about what a subsequent U.S. president might someday do. We should pursue environmental policies that yield actual benefits at reasonable costs while supporting economic growth and job creation. That is how we used to approach the issue, and it resulted in decades of improvements in air and water quality, alongside continued economic growth.