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How did we get into such a fix? It’s easy to blame the opposition, and indeed the Conservatives have been prominently mulish on the question. If we take them at their word that they believe climate change is real and requires government intervention, then the benchmark against which to measure the cost of carbon pricing is not, as their every line of rhetoric implies, doing nothing, but doing something else: those other programs I have just described, all of them implying higher costs, per tonne of emissions reduced, than carbon pricing — costs that are just as surely passed onto Canadians as any carbon tax would be.

But if carbon pricing has been misrepresented by its opponents, it has been almost universally mishandled by its sponsors.

Unwilling to charge a price sufficient to spur the needed changes in behaviour for fear of the expected political backlash, they are instead charging a price sufficient merely to annoy — $10 per tonne, rising to $50 by 2022, versus the $200 that has been calculated would be needed to hit our 2030 targets.

This is one of those situations where the bolder course is also the more pragmatic

Rather than recycle any revenues collected back to the public in the form of cuts in other taxes, moreover, as under B.C.’s pioneering (and successful) carbon tax, they have increasingly used the proceeds to spend on other things, notably the same failed subsidy and regulatory programs carbon taxes were supposed to replace.

Indeed, not only have they kept all the old programs, but they are piling new ones on top, hoping these costlier, but invisible-to-the-public programs will attract less popular wrath than the cheaper but all-too-visible carbon tax. But the failure to tax carbon at a level that will do much good only invites the public to ask why it is being taxed at all. And, equally, it invites the response: as a revenue grab. We have, in short, the worst of both worlds, saddled with programs that won’t work but will cause maximum public aggravation.