On the carbon tax, the Opposition’s cynicism neatly coincides with the public’s

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As the carbon-tax death march staggers forward – the Liberals under Justin Trudeau pressing grimly on, while swarms of premiers peck out their eyes – it falls to a wayward journalist to muse: what if?

What if the Liberals had taken direct responsibility for the carbon tax from the start, instead of wasting years trying to inveigle the provinces into imposing it for them? What if they’d implemented it as advertised – as a replacement for a slew of costly, ineffective regulatory and subsidy schemes, rather than a supplement?

What if, instead of receiving the occasional opaquely labelled “climate action incentive payment” – too small to notice, too far removed to make the connection – Canadians had been compensated with offsetting income-tax cuts, something they would have seen and felt every two weeks on their paycheques?

What if the tax had been phased in faster, while the Liberals were still popular? Most of all, what if the Prime Minister had not caved to pressure from his Atlantic MPs last fall and carved out an exception for home heating oil?

I’m not saying the tax, or the Liberals, would be in the clear. But it would at least have left the Prime Minister with some usable talking points.

As it is, he’s got nothing. He would have been in a far better position to portray himself as the unbending man of principle who disdains mere popularity and scorns those “short-term thinker politicians” who “bow to political pressure” had he not done the same exact thing less than six months ago. Or, in the matter of alcohol excise taxes, less than two weeks ago.

Likewise, Mr. Trudeau would have been excellently placed to wrongfoot the Conservatives as seventies-style dirigistes, who want to use the “heavy hand of government through regulation and subsidies to pick winners and losers in the economy as opposed to trusting the market,” were his own policies not so reliant on the heavy hand of government using regulation and subsidies to pick winners and losers in the economy.

By my calculations, the Liberals are relying on the carbon tax for just one-third of actual and projected emissions reductions. The rest is an endless parade of mandatory this and regulatory that: Clean Fuel Regulations, Clean Electricity Regulations, the oil and gas emissions cap, the ban on internal combustion engines, on and on and on – oh, and $50-billion in subsidies for three electric-vehicle battery plants.

Still, the Liberals are paragons of principle on this file next to the Opposition. The premiers who are popping up, mournful of countenance and furrowed of brow, to “request” that the scheduled April 1 increase in the tax be postponed in the name of “affordability,” know it does not cost most Canadians a nickel, on net – it really is true that the bottom 80 per cent of households receive more in the rebate than they pay in carbon tax, whatever the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s efforts to confuse the matter.

But, well, it’s a free kick. The Liberals are at 24 points in the polls. What do you expect the premiers to do – not exploit the government’s weakness to score a cheap political point?

As for the Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, I suppose he is to be congratulated. The Liberals won three elections on a promise of taking action on climate change, which had become equated with the carbon tax. Many people concluded this meant the public wanted action on climate change, and were willing to pay the carbon tax.

But Mr. Poilievre saw through the public. He understood that the public are deeply, almost perversely, hypocritical on this as on most things: they want something done about the climate but they want someone else to pay for it. Or, perhaps: they are prepared to pay for it, if they have to, but they want to be lied to about it.

They want to pretend that a tax that applies only to “the big polluters” would not be passed on to them, or that they would not also pay the costs of whatever regulations and subsidy schemes Mr. Poilievre eventually proposes, if he does. They know it is a lie. They know that nothing is free. They just don’t want to have it rubbed in their faces. Which is more or less the point of a carbon tax.

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. It may simply be that the public were all for action on climate change as long as the economy was strong, but as soon as inflation began to climb, they lost all interest.

Either way, Mr. Poilievre correctly read their ambivalence, understood that they were every bit as cynical as he is and is about to be rewarded for it. To the victor the spoils and all that.