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Until this week, the chess board favoured Trudeau

Phillips’s climate change plan certainly won’t thrill those who believe the planet is fast on its way to becoming uninhabitable, but that a relatively small carbon tax might fix it. That’s not Phillips’s target audience, although this plan does not dispute that climate change and its consequences are real and must be addressed. It even goes so far as to pick up the Liberals’ favourite term for carbon dioxide emissions, calling them “pollution.”

Photo by Liam Richards/The Canadian Press

Phillips’s optimism about meeting Ontario’s share of Canada’s Paris Agreement carbon reduction commitment is based on the fact that the province is already more than two-thirds of the way there. The accord calls for reducing emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels. Ontario is now at 22 per cent and has a dozen years to achieve the rest of the target.

Ontario’s favourable situation is largely due to the previous Liberal government. Although costly and poorly managed, the Liberals’ shutdown of coal-fired power plants did produce real emissions reductions in Ontario, unlike their subsequent cap-and-trade plan, which relied on emissions cuts outside Ontario to meet its goals.

These are all relatively small, achievable, made-in-Ontario solutions of a sort that a rational person can easily endorse

To get the rest of the way, Phillips proposes a range of actions, including some things that will happen with or without government involvement. For example, as electric cars become more common, vehicle emissions will go down. The biggest new thing in the plan is setting industry-specific emissions standards for the industrial sector and making those who don’t meet the standards pay. Those payments will bolster the Ontario Carbon Trust, which will use $400 million in public money to help support cost-effective carbon reduction technologies.