There’ll be money to encourage homeowners to retrofit their houses and increase energy efficiency. Businesses will be eligible for tax breaks to develop eco-friendly technology. Big industrial polluters will be forced to invest in R&D for “emissions-reducing technology.”

But wait, there’s more! There’ll be a Green Patent Credit and a Green Technology and Innovation Fund. Plus a Green Hub for Innovation, not to mention plans to deal with invasive species and wetlands and migratory birds and, oh yes, plastic waste. So many plans!

If such a scheme was presented by a left-leaning political party, you might well expect conservatives to jump all over it as a typical over-complicated effort at social engineering. Another quasi-socialist attempt to micro-manage the economy, they would cry. Simply won’t work, they would opine.

As it turns out, though, all this (and more!) is the product of Canada’s own Conservative Party. Andrew Scheer knew he needed to come out with a plan to address climate change and the environment, and boy did he ever.

As expected, the theme is “Green Technology, not Taxes.” There’s everything but a low-flow, super-efficient kitchen sink in Scheer’s plan, but what there isn’t is anything resembling a carbon tax along the lines of what the federal Liberals have championed as a key element in fighting climate change.

Carbon pricing (or the “carbon tax” as Conservatives call it) is anathema to Canada’s Conservative parties and governments, from Edmonton to Queen’s Park. Instead, as per Scheer, they’re wooing voters with an array of complicated programs that purport to get us to the promised land of lower carbon emissions without the pain of actually paying for it.

At the heart of all these plans, including the one that Scheer unveiled on Wednesday, is what amounts to a lie.

He and other Conservatives acknowledge that climate change is a real, serious problem that we have to tackle now. And to his credit, Scheer is sticking with Canada’s commitment to meeting its climate goals under the Paris Agreement of 2015.

But his message is that someone else (industry, “big polluters,” and the like) should pay for it while regular folks (“middle-class families just trying to pay their bills”) should be let off the hook.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. There are indeed costs involved in transitioning to a low-carbon economy, and the issue is whether they will be made at least partly transparent through carbon pricing or hidden in higher prices for goods and services passed on by businesses.

Conservatives are counting on consumers (and voters) preferring to have the costs hidden instead of having it rubbed in their faces through higher prices at the gas pump (even if most taxpayers get more back through tax rebates, as the Liberal carbon pricing plan provides).

The Conservatives may be right when it comes to electoral calculations; voters may indeed prefer not to face up to the cost of going green. But that doesn’t mean they’re right when it comes to actually fighting climate change, and it doesn’t mean they’re choosing the most efficient path to lowering carbon emissions.

In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Economists of all political leanings have long argued that carbon pricing is the most effective and most efficient way to lower carbon emissions. The logic is irresistible: if you make something more expensive, people and businesses will tend to use less of it. And they’ll use all their ingenuity to find ways to do that.

That’s the theory, and a recent study of the Ford government’s climate plan for Ontario (which is similar in principle to Scheer’s) suggests it will be borne out in reality. Prepared by EnviroEconomics for a think-tank called Canadians for Clean Prosperity, it concludes that Ontario’s climate policies will be 59 per cent more expensive for businesses and households than Ottawa’s carbon pricing plan by 2022.

That’s because trying to lower carbon emissions by regulating specific industries is harder to do and less efficient than imposing economy-wide pricing on carbon. And the costs eventually trickle down to consumers, who end up footing the bill in any case even if it’s largely invisible to them.

There’s every reason to believe the Scheer plan would end up having the same effect. Similar environmental schemes have been tried in the past and have always fallen short.

Indeed, the Green Homes Tax Credit promised by the Conservatives looks like a straight-up revival of the home retrofitting plan killed by the Harper Conservatives back in January 2012. That scheme was called the ecoENERGY Retrofit Program and offered homeowners up to $5,000 to make their houses more environmentally efficient. The Scheer version would offer just $2,850; apparently everything old is new again — and cheaper.

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

As a political ploy to shore up Conservative hopes for October’s federal election, this plan makes a lot of sense.

As a way of actually achieving Canada’s climate goals in the most sensible way possible, not so much.

Read more about: