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Photo by Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun

The Tories’ People’s Guarantee talks about ditching the provincial Liberals’ cap-and-trade system in favour of the broader carbon tax the federal Liberals say they’ll put on any province that doesn’t have a carbon-pricing system of its own by the end of this year. The feds will tax carbon emissions and give the proceeds to the provincial government. The People’s Guarantee calls that “opt(ing) in to the federal carbon price backstop.”

The federal tax is much, much heavier than the cap-and-trade system Ontario already has. The current system sells carbon-emitting permits in auctions. Those aren’t perfectly predictable but the Ontario government projects a take between $1.4 billion and $1.8 billion a year for the next several.

The Tory plan expects that switching to the federal carbon tax would mean $2.4 billion in extra revenue, after a couple of wobbly adjustment years.

This isn’t some gotcha calculation based on numbers from page 31 and page 187 or anything. It’s right there in a handy chart that sums up the accounting: “Net New Federal Carbon Price Revenue,” it says, with numbers that rise to $2.405 billion in 2021.

The sooner Ontario gets out of the cap-and-trade business, a footnote adds, the more money we can expect from the feds.

I’ll say that again because I know it’s hard to believe: The Progressive Conservatives expect to make about three times as much money off carbon pricing as the Liberals do.

Now, what a PC government would do with all that money is very different. The Liberals have a detailed plan to spend their cap-and-trade money on green projects, from transit to energy-efficiency retrofits to research on low-emission energy, totalling $1.9 billion a year. The Tories would scrap all that.