Justin Trudeau should get down on his knees and thank the fates for electing Doug Ford.

Before Ford became Ontario premier, Trudeau was in danger of being outed as a fraud on the all-important climate change file. But Ford is such a laggard in this area that no matter how little the Liberal prime minister does, he seems active by comparison.

Ford’s decision to challenge Trudeau’s carbon tax in court serves to obscure the reality of the proposed federal levy, namely that it is too low to be effective. And it allows Trudeau to continue pretending that his climate change strategy is vastly different from that of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — when in fact it is not.

When Trudeau’s Liberals were in opposition, they mocked Harper’s timidity in fighting global warming. His target — to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 — was dismissed by the Liberals as grossly inadequate.

Yet once they took power, the Trudeau Liberals made this inadequate target their own. Like Harper in his day, they are still not on track to meet it.

When he was prime minister, Harper insisted that Canada could not move more aggressively against climate change than its major trading partner, the U.S.

Harper’s Conservatives did move in lock-step with then U.S. president Barack Obama, echoing his focus on coal-fired electricity generating plants and, in 2012, matching his plan to strengthen auto emission standards.

Trudeau doesn’t talk about this as much. But in practice, he too keeps a weather eye on the Americans.

In 2016, he very publicly matched Obama’s decision to reduce methane emissions. A year later, after Donald Trump reversed that Obama move, Canada’s Liberal government quietly announced it would delay implementation of its new methane rules until 2023.

Last week, Ottawa announced even more quietly that it plans to ease proposed carbon tax rules for big industrial polluters in order to match the new laissez-faire attitude of the Trump regime.

Also last week came news that Trump is moving to axe Obama’s tougher vehicle emission standards, the ones that Canada matched six years ago. We shall see how the Trudeau Liberal government reacts to that.

Where Trudeau differs dramatically from Harper is on carbon taxes. The Conservatives, while willing to legislate nationally, were wary of implementing anything that could be seen as a new tax. The Liberals, while nervous (they prefer the term carbon “price” to carbon “tax”), have been more adventurous.

In Trudeau’s boldest move to date, he warned provincial governments that if they didn’t come up with their own carbon pricing plans, Ottawa would impose its own.

The only problem with this plan is that Ottawa’s fallback carbon tax — set to start at $20 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions next year and rising to $50 per tonne by 2022 — is too low. If carbon taxes are to work, they must be high enough to discourage consumers from using products, like gasoline, that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts I’ve talked to say that, to be effective, carbon taxes must be set at about $30 per tonne now, rising to $200 a tonne by 2030.

There is no indication that the Liberal government is willing to be so audacious.

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That’s why the Doug Ford sideshow is such a useful distraction for Trudeau. On the climate-change file, Ford is the perfect foil. He knows what he doesn’t like but offers no alternatives. He spends his time ranting against a federal carbon tax that currently exists only in theory and that once implemented would be so low as to barely register.

He is a cartoon character waging a phoney war. And in the all-important area of fighting destructive climate change — even as Northeastern Ontario burns — he lets Trudeau’s government off the hook.

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