Like their Ontario cousins, federal Conservatives have belatedly seen the light on social conservatism.

One day soon, a new federal leader will be seen marching in a Pride parade, following in the footsteps of Premier Doug Ford and Ontario’s previous Progressive Conservative leader, Patrick Brown. It took years to catch up on gay marriage, but it now seems officially OK for Conservatives, just as abortion is suddenly a settled issue decades after prosecution ended and incarceration stopped.

Now, how long until Tories everywhere find their way on carbon pricing?

With another national leadership race gathering steam, greenhouse gas emissions are once again on the back burner. Any candidate who dares to reconsider carbon pricing risks being burned at the stake, unless he recants and admits his mistake.

For true-blue Tories, a carbon tax — or levy — is the litmus test of ideological fidelity. Once again, it must be publicly abhorred, abjured, denounced and disavowed.

Behold the backpedalling by Ontario MP Marilyn Gladu. In the aftermath of the 2019 election, she had admitted the obvious — that voters had rendered a favourable verdict on carbon pricing. “Canadians have said that they will accept it,” she mused, noting that it would not be “profitable to try take away” the levy.

That was then. This is now, and after announcing her leadership ambitions, she can no longer countenance carbon pricing — even if Canadians clearly can: “I will revoke the federal carbon tax,” she told the Globe and Mail the other day.

No surprise. An aspiring leader must either revoke carbon pricing or reconsider their candidacy.

Never mind the right-wing roots of carbon pricing, first conceived by free enterprise thinkers in the U.S. who settled on the market solution of price signals to discourage pollution, rather than regulation that would strangle and entangle entrepreneurs. No matter that it thrived under California’s then-Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and survived under right-leaning premiers in Quebec (Jean Charest) and B.C. (first Gordon Campbell, later Christy Clark).

Little wonder that Charest decided against seeking the leadership of the federal party last month. As a passionate defender of cap and trade in Quebec, and a former federal environment minister in the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, he understood that today’s Tories are frozen in time on global warming.

This month, it was Clark’s turn to opt out of a leadership run, despite her evident qualifications. The inconvenient truth is that her province led the way with the continent’s first carbon tax, and soon led the country in economic growth.

Also last month, MP Michael Chong announced he would not run again for the leadership, after being trounced in his last try for, among other things, advocating carbon pricing. A leader must heed the grassroots, he concluded, but Tories won’t be led to a levy.

Such is the paradox of party politics. Chong, Charest and Clark (and in her own way, Gladu) could see the lay of the land thanks to the federal election results, but also knew that a levy was a dead end among party members.

Most Canadians see the environment through a geographic lens, but Conservative candidates must view the political environment through their party’s demographic filter: Their fellow Tories are now so predictably anti-tax that it matters not if the current carbon levy is rebatable — it is still not debatable.

We have seen this dance before in Ontario. Running for the provincial leadership in 2015, Brown waffled expertly on the issue, buying time so he could confound critics and supporters alike.

Only after he became leader did Brown — whose declared role models were three PC environmental activists (Mulroney, Charest, and former premier Bill Davis) — declare, unsurprisingly, that he would go along with federal carbon pricing. The moment he relinquished the leadership in early 2018, however, Ontario’s Tories went back in time and fell into line.

Ford entered the race vowing to kill the “job-killing carbon tax.” Rival candidate Christine Elliott waffled first, followed by whirling dervish Caroline Mulroney, whose environmental about-face surely left her father, the former prime minister, red-faced.

Ontario’s Tories have been raging against the levy ever since, warning consumers urgently on Twitter last March to fill up fast before they were out of pocket when the 4.4-cent-a-litre carbon levy took effect on April 1. Awkwardly for them, the price of gas is lower today than it was back then, and there are tens of thousands more jobs in Ontario than when the “job-killing carbon tax” was imposed.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

There is speculation that John Baird, who once served as Stephen Harper’s environment minister, might enter the Conservative leadership race in the coming days. Baird knows better than most how out of touch the federal Tories were in last October’s election, because he was tasked with writing an internal party report in the aftermath.

Baird understands how poorly the Tories comported themselves on social issues such as gay marriage. He can also comprehend how out of sync they were on carbon pricing with voters at large, and the world writ large.

If he runs, let’s see how Baird squares the circle. If he doesn’t, let’s see how Conservatives keep going in circles on global warming.

Read more about: