Doug Ford’s losing battle over carbon pricing comes at a price.

All of us are being bled by $30 million to satisfy his vanity. That’s how much his provincial government (ours, actually) has budgeted from its treasury (using our tax dollars) to fight a carbon law enacted by the Trudeau government.

The premier is fighting, flailing and failing on two fronts:

First, his Ontario Tories are spending heavily on an advertising campaign designed to persuade the court of public opinion to oppose a carbon tax. If it’s so self-evidently unpopular, why are we citizens paying to persuade ourselves? And why must gas stations affix Ford’s anti-tax stickers on their gas pumps or face a $10,000 fine if they’re out of line?

Second, his Progressive Conservatives are also bankrolling big legal bills to overturn the federal carbon law in the country’s court rooms. Last week, Ontario’s Court of Appeal judges delivered a devastating verdict against Ford; last May, Saskatchewan’s top court reconfirmed Ottawa’s authority; yet the premier is appealing all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where almost every legal expert has predicted from the outset the constitutionality of carbon pricing will be upheld.

The latest Ontario ruling makes the common sense case for Ottawa to set a national standard for international compliance, because the alternative is carbon Balkanization. Without a federal backstop, provinces would be pitted against one another — outliers versus compliers, free riders polluting as they please, leaving the rest of the country to cope with carbon leakage and climate damage.

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But this was never about law or logic. Ford’s “axe the tax” sloganeering was always a pure populist play, money well spent for personal branding even if it’s going down the drain.

It imposes unprecedented costs, yet we must also understand the historical parallels. In fact, raging and fighting against a changing international climate is nothing new in Canadian politics.

Nearly five decades ago, discontented Tories targeted another Trudeau government on another issue that galvanized their resentment against global intrusions and institutions: Lest we forget, anti-metric madness gripped the country in the 1970s.

It is a faded, forgotten chapter in our history. But all these years later, the rebellion against the metric system provides a historical lesson, easily repurposed into a prologue for today’s battle against a carbon tax.

Then as now, opponents raged against perceived domination — foreign, domestic or metric — defending our way of life and fending off the march of time. If metric was heresy back then, carbon pricing is hooey today.

Opponents of metric rallied to the British imperial system as quintessentially Canadian. The polarizing debate pitted traditionalists against modernists, colonial loyalists against godless internationalists, rural folk against urban elites.

Then-PM Pierre Trudeau bore the brunt of anti-government protests and ongoing court battles, not unlike the legal spats of today. How dare any government tell defenders of the old system how they measured up?

The tabloid Toronto Sun teamed up with opposition Tories to stir up public outrage, organizing a petition. Facing defiance, Parliament imposed compliance. Ultimately, anti-metric madness petered out as Fahrenheit faded to Celsius, and pounds gravitated to kilograms.

Today’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, faces his own phoney war not over metric, but how we measure up. Just as the father stared down opposition to our changing international climate, the son faces resistance to global climate change.

In the 1970s, critics argued that a weak economy and rising fuel prices could not support conversion to a metric system. Today, opponents argue that a strong economy and relatively stable fuel prices cannot withstand carbon pricing.

In late March, Ford’s Tories mounted a social media blitz urging Ontarians to fill up their tanks before an anticipated 4.4 cents a litre increase from the new carbon tax that took effect on April 1: “Today’s the last day to fill your gas tank before the federal carbon tax makes life more expensive for your family,” Ford warned helpfully. “We’ll keep fighting to stop this terrible tax with every tool at our disposal.”

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Two months later, what’s happened at the pump? Did the premier’s Twitter storm save us money?

In line with the carbon tax estimate of 4.4 cents a litre, gas prices did indeed go up — for a time — from 114.7 cents a litre on March 31 to 118.6 cents on April 2. Oddly, by April 27, Toronto pump prices averaged 130.4 cents a litre — well beyond any carbon tax impact (all data from the Fuel Price Trends analysis on gasbuddy.com).

But then gas prices went down, even further down, belying Ford’s dire predictions: By June 14, prices had fallen back to 113.2 cents a litre — 1.5 cents less than the pre-tax price. Evidence, if anyone still needed it, that global oil supply fluctuations are a far bigger factor than the plus-or-minus rounding error of carbon pricing.

For those who persist in keeping track, pump prices rose again ahead of the holiday weekend, reaching 122.7 cents a litre on July 1 (or $5.58 per imperial gallon, for diehards who still defy metric measures — not to be confused with $4.65 per U.S. gallon). Proof, perhaps, that price hikes have more to do with oil companies profiteering on Canada Day than carbon pricing.

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