The choice before Canadians is policies that do nothing, or that do too little at too high a cost, or that do too much at much too high a cost

When it comes to the parties’ positions on climate change, the public will not lack for choice in the next election: you can have just about any type of climate change policy you want, that is, as long as it’s irresponsible.

There is, first, the People’s Party, whose leader, Maxime Bernier, insists he thinks climate change is real but has no plan to deal with it and doesn’t intend to have any — since, as he explained, under the constitution, the fate of the planet is a provincial matter: “provinces, they have programs for that.”

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There are, second, the Conservatives, who also have no plan but who have lately let slip that whatever plan they eventually come up with will not achieve the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to which the Conservatives committed Canada in the Paris Accord — a 30 per cent cut from 2005 levels by 2030 — and to which the current party leader recommitted himself only months ago.

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There are, third, the Liberals, who have a plan they pretend will meet our Paris commitments — which in opposition they derided as inadequate, only to adopt them once in government — in the face of a series of projections from their own Environment Department showing it will fall far short.

Indeed, the most recent of these found, far from making progress towards our commitments, we are further away than we were the year before: a projected 79 megatonnes over our 2030 target versus the previous 66 MT margin.

That has brought charges from the Conservatives that the Liberals have another, secret plan, one that would see their signature carbon tax rise beyond the $50 per tonne to which it is scheduled to rise by 2022, perhaps as high as $300. There is no actual evidence of this, you understand, only economists’ estimates that a tax of something like that amount would be required to achieve the desired reductions, if no other measures were put in place.

But of course the Liberals have all manner of other measures in mind, banning some activities and subsidizing others, precisely in order to avoid having to raise the carbon tax to such levels. Yet almost all of them are, economists calculate, significantly more costly per tonne of emissions than a carbon tax. The difference between the parties is that, whereas the Conservatives would implement only these more expensive measures, in preference to the carbon tax, the Liberals would do both.

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That leaves the NDP and the Greens. Like the Conservatives, the NDP has yet to release a climate change plan: it campaigned for a national cap-and-trade system during the last election, but that was under Tom Mulcair, so presumably is no longer operative. Like the Liberals, the Greens would implement a carbon tax (with offsetting “dividends”). And like both the Conservatives and the Liberals, both would keep all manner of costly and inefficient existing programs in place, while adding still more costly and inefficient programs on top.

The difference is that unlike the Liberals or the Conservatives neither is in any danger of being elected. So whereas the Liberals are careful to hide the costs of their plan or defer them until after the election, their cousins on the left seem unfamiliar with the whole concept of cost. The NDP has endorsed a UN call for reductions of 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, while the Greens have called for cuts of 40 per cent from 2005 levels by 2025, and to 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050 — targets that are not only far beyond the Paris commitments we are nowhere near attaining, but unattainable.

Photo by Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

That contrasts with Conservatives, who are obsessed with the costs of the tax, to the exclusion, not only of the offsetting rebates available under both federal and provincial versions, but increasingly of any sense of reality. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s claim last week that the federal carbon tax would cause a recession had seemed to set the standard — Environment Canada projections put the net cost to the economy by 2022 at just 0.1 per cent of GDP — until this week’s outburst from an Alberta Conservative to the effect that the province’s carbon tax was costing her church $50,000 a year: an estimate that, as one economist put it, would represent the energy consumption of “five or six Notre Dame cathedrals.”

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Of course, virtually no countries are on track to hit their Paris targets at the moment, and few are likely to do so even by the target date of 2030: as there is no provision for their enforcement, the temptation to free ride will be irresistible. And whatever the rest of the world does or does not do, Canada’s efforts are more or less irrelevant, given that we account for just 1.6 per cent of world emissions. That’s not an argument for doing nothing, as Bernier proposes. It is an argument for doing the bare minimum: for meeting our commitments at the lowest possible cost.

Which is to say, a carbon-tax only policy, using carbon taxes as a replacement for other, costlier measures rather than in addition to them. To really minimize the cost, any revenues collected would ideally be rebated in the form of productivity-boosting cuts in income tax rates, rather than as lump-sum payments.

Needless to say this is the policy of no party. The choice before Canadians, rather, is between policies that do nothing, or that do too little at too high a cost, or that do too much at much too high a cost: between the inadequate and the insane. It’s not terribly inspiring, but that’s democracy.