Canada was less than a month away from signing the Kyoto Protocol when opposition leader Preston Manning stood up in the House of Commons to accuse prime minister Jean Chrétien of trying to hoodwink Canadians with a gasoline tax.
In the fall of 1997, gasoline cost as little as 56¢ a litre in downtown Ottawa. If the “Liberal Kyoto deal” went through, warned Mr. Manning, fuel prices would skyrocket to the then-unbelievable sum of 90¢ a litre.
“Do not run away, do not make excuses and do not change the subject: Will there be a jump at the pump to pay for the Kyoto deal?” he asked.
Less than 20 years later, Mr. Manning is spending his golden years as one of Canada’s leading proponents of putting a price on pollution — a strategy guaranteed to drive up fuel prices.
“If you value a healthy environment, somebody’s going to have to pay for it,” he told the National Post by phone. “It’s how you do it, not whether you have to do it.”
The stance has made him the darling of activists who once gagged at the mention of the Reform Party, while earning him ire from the conservative heartland that once sent his upstart political movement to Ottawa.
But if Canada ever winds up with a carbon tax, the country’s Conservative godfather should get much of the credit.
“This concept was bungled when it was first introduced,” said Mr. Manning, pointing to Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s “tragic” Green Shift. This focused too heavily on petroleum, was too heavy on the word “tax” and was generally poorly communicated.
The 73-year-old also still opposes the Kyoto Protocol, which he maintains was a hackneyed and insincere agreement doomed to fail without provincial support.
His basic argument — expressed in editorials, speaking tours and conferences organized by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy — is the negative aspects of any economic activity should be rolled into the cost of the development.
The former opposition leader calls it “pricing pollution.” He argues conservative weakness on environmental issues is losing support for right-leaning parties across Canada.
Mr. Manning’s mantra is there is nothing incompatible about conservation and conservatism.
“There are a lot of people who work with the environment, in the environment and have integrated it with their own economic activity,” he said. “Those are the real allies. Those people are totally committed to conservation.”
But in recent weeks, his green credibility has got him pilloried on conservative blogs as a traitor or “senile.” Ezra Levant targeted Mr. Manning on his Sun News Network show and even started a website, ReformManning.ca.
His environmental advocacy is earning him some strange bedfellows. He’s shared a platform with environmentalist David Suzuki, and sits on the advisory board of the Ecofiscal Commission with former B.C. New Democratic Party leader Mike Harcourt and Peter Robinson, chief executive of Mr. Suzuki ‘s foundation.
His name is also becoming a shorthand way for environmentalists to shame Tories on climate change inaction.
Last month, Green Party MP Bruce Hyer cited Mr. Manning’s support of a carbon tax before asking fellow MPs “which Conservatives will dare to publicly agree with Mr. Manning and let markets reduce both CO2 and poverty?”
Mr. Manning points out he says plenty of things staunch environmentalists would disagree with. “They’re like a fundamentalist preacher cherry-picking passages out of the Bible,” he said.
For one, he advocates pollution pricing on all forms of energy. While oil producers would be slapped with a carbon tax, hydroelectric dams and windmills would need to pony up for flooding the wilderness and killing birds, respectively.
Hardcore green activists would definitely object to the somewhat counter-intuitive endgame of Mr. Manning’s environmental advocacy: Keeping the oil pumping.
“[Energy] is the horse that’s been pulling the Canadian economy, whether Central Canada and Atlantic Canada realize it or not,” he said.
But with Canada being hammered abroad for its failure to address emissions, a market-based solution is overdue.
The trick, though, is that pollution pricing will inevitably make things more expensive. Mr. Manning bristles at the slogan of “polluter pays,” as he notes every consumer ultimately ends up paying the costs of pollution pricing.
Still, he compared the policy to the quest to slash Canada’s budget. The issue was considered electorally moot when Reform was founded in 1987.
Nevertheless, as public opinion gradually shifted — and ratings downgrades hit Canada’s debt — the issue progressed to the point where voters were demanding their government enact painful policies to cut spending.
And already, Mr. Manning’s personal experience and the Manning Centre’s public opinion polls point to environmental issues becoming one of the top priorities of younger Canadians.
“We’re not denying the validity of what previous generations were doing, but we should respect what’s right for the next generation.”
National Post
Source:: National Post
