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Rather, the official Conservative position favours, as a remedy, regulations limiting emissions by industry (even if they never got around to implementing many of these). Interim leader Rona Ambrose, attacking the Liberal carbon price plan this week, said her party favours “regulation on industry rather than taxes on Canadians,” as if the costs of regulation were not a form of tax, or that industry would not pass on these costs to “Canadians.”

This has lost none of its power to astonish for all the years the Tories have been spouting it. The party of free markets, rather than support a plan that relies on the quintessential market instrument — prices — favours the most costly, intrusive and regulatory-heavy approach imaginable: the very approach that has so signally failed to date. The party of personal responsibility favours sparing people the costs of their economic choices, either socializing them via subsidy or disguising them via regulation.

This might have been understandable, once. It was the left that first sounded the alarm over climate change; Conservatives could be forgiven for reacting skeptically, at least at first. But when the left, defying stereotype, adopted carbon pricing as the solution, Conservatives let their oppositional instincts get the better of them. If the left were for prices, they would be against them. They have been boxed into that position ever since.

This isn’t just economic madness. It’s dumb politics. It makes the Conservatives look unserious on an issue that for many voters is an entrance exam. More than that, it is a massive missed opportunity – not only to show “Conservatives care about the environment,” but to make the case for markets and market-based approaches more generally – markets, not merely as arenas for private gain, but in their truer role, as instruments for solving collective problems. Carbon pricing is the biggest victory for markets in a generation, and conservatives are nowhere to be found.