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As ever, the failure to embrace carbon pricing remains a missed opportunity for Conservatives

But no, all pledge to repeal cap-and-trade, thereby guaranteeing the imposition of a federal carbon tax in its place: one that, as the platform boasts, would reduce the province’s carbon dioxide emissions by 10 megatonnes more over four years than what cap and trade would achieve. The sum effect of the candidates’ position, then, is to ensure precisely the thing to which they claim to be opposed.

That is the least of the contortions the Conservatives’ reflexive hostility to a carbon tax, or indeed to carbon pricing in any form, has required of them.

All claim to acknowledge the reality of climate change, yet they refuse to do anything meaningful about it. Or where they do commit to do something, it is by the most expensive, least effective means possible: regulatory and subsidy programs, the kind we already have in abundance at every level of government, and which have so signally failed to make much progress in reducing national emissions.

As ever, the failure to embrace carbon pricing remains a missed opportunity for Conservatives: not only to prove their bona fides on the environment, but to replace all those existing schemes — and to make deep cuts in taxes in the bargain: to use carbon pricing, not just as a shield, but as a sword.

The platform had begun to show some awareness of these possibilities. The Ontario Tories’ not-quite-about-face will not materially change the policy of the party from that laid out in the platform. It will just ensure they get none of the credit.