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This is the sort of narrowing of party differences you see before an election, especially on these sorts of big, difficult issues

Similarly, while the NDP, like the Conservatives, like to pretend their policy would only apply to “the big polluters,” one way or another that tax is certain to be passed on, whether to consumers or workers or shareholders. Which is to say, you. And until this week, Mr. Trudeau was among the brave few willing to sort of admit it. He might not have been clear on which sort of carbon “price” he preferred, but he was clear that he would be the one to impose it. Or at least, he seemed to be.

If that is no longer the case — if the policy of the federal Liberal party is limited to “co-ordinating” and “overseeing” what the provinces are already doing on their own, from a “carbon tax” to a “sort of a carbon tax” to “cap and trade” to whatever it is Ontario has planned — then there is not much left of Liberal policy on climate change. Which is to say, it now closely resembles Conservative policy.

You’ll recall the prime minister’s own fairly spectacular volte face, in the course of his annual round of year-end interviews, in which he let slip that he was no longer unalterably opposed to pricing carbon, so long as someone else does it. Specifically, he mentioned Alberta’s carbon tax — whoops, carbon price — as “a model” for the sort of “continental” approach he prefers. Provincial, continental, anything so long as it’s not national. And not a tax: “It’s not a levy, it’s a price,” he told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

This is the sort of narrowing of party differences you often see before an election, especially on these sorts of big, difficult issues — the kind the public might prefer to see debated in the campaign. The question is whether this new bipartisan consensus makes any sense as policy. There’s lots of room to experiment on which kind of pricing model works best, and provinces often make good laboratories for this sort of thing.