If you are a Northerner with Liberal friends, you have the opportunity of a lifetime. You can influence national policy with a few well-placed words.
Over the next few weeks the Liberal party will decide if it is going to commit to a carbon tax. Dion wants to do it and so does deputy leader, Michael Ignatieff. These are very smart people, but many Liberal members and some of the party strategists are terrified. They are convinced that if Canadians hear the word TAX without the word LOWER in front of it, they will rush to support Steven Harper. Basically, they think you and I are too stupid to understand that a carbon tax is a good thing, or too selfish to vote for it.
This is where you come in – tell your Liberal friends that Canadians are not as stupid as the strategists think. Tell them you are more likely to vote Liberal if the party shows some leadership on the most serious issue the world is facing.
Maybe you aren't sure. You have heard a lot of negative comments, and you may not know that most of them are coming from the oil and power industries. What you haven't heard is the government's own advisory panel telling them we have to have a carbon tax.
Remember Rona Ambrose, that very unsuccessful Minister of the Environment?
On November 10, 2006, she asked the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) to tell her how to reduce carbon emissions up to 60 per cent. Harper dumped her before the report came back at the end of 2007.
The NRTEE basically said that her very modest goal was fairly easy to meet. The most important step was to put an economy-wide price on carbon as soon as possible.
There was still some disagreement about what kind of tax. Dion wants a scheme that uses the revenue to reduce other taxes. This is what most economists advocate. Harper has promised a cap and trade system that gives the revenue to the big polluters.
The elephant in the room is hiding under Rona Ambrose's 60 per cent target.
It sounds like a big reduction, but it is really very timid. Canada's emissions are actually higher than any country except Luxembourg, the Gulf States, and a few very odd small countries. Our per-capita emissions are about 145 tons of carbon per year.
The respected British environmentalist George Monbiot says,'you could scarcely do more to destroy the biosphere if you tried." Reducing our emissions by 60 per cent leaves us dumping 145 times as much as anyone else will be allowed to if we are to keep the temperature rise to two degrees.
Many scientists argue that emissions must be reduced from seven billion tonnes to 2.7 billion tons per year by 2030. Since there are 6.6 billion people on the Earth right now, your share would be only 0.41 tons per year.
Of course the world population is likely to be over nine billion by 2030, so your share will shrink. Even if world emissions are not reduced, your share is only enough to drive a small car 15,000 miles. This leaves nothing left to heat your house in November.
Canadians are a fair-minded people.
If we wanted to share fairly with the rest of the world, we would need to cut our emissions by 99.5 per cent.
That's why you want Dion's carbon tax. Harper's cap and trade system is a big give-away. Why hand all that revenue to foreign owned oil and gas companies? Why not use it to pay for the other reductions.
A carbon tax will be good for the forestry sector and good for Ontario industry. We may not get it because one of our political leaders believe that old American proverb that says "No one ever lost an election by underestimating the intelligence of the electorate."
Canada's future is balancing on a knife edge. So is the future of Northern Ontario.
You may be the person who makes the carbon tax one of the key issues in the next election. Or you could push it off the table. All you have to do is whisper in the ear of a Liberal.
Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at LaurentianUniversity.drobinson@laurentian.ca
