Cancelling cap-and-trade was one of the best moves the Ontario premier ever made
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If you believe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the carbon tax imposed on Ontario is Premier Doug Ford’s fault. Not only that, the PM would like voters to think he’s the champion of building housing faster and Ford’s the guy holding things up. It’s as if Trudeau has stepped into an alternative universe where Ford is responsible for the housing mess, not the guy with the aggressive population expansion policy.
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It’s a wacky strategy by a Liberal leader desperate to blame someone else for his own mistakes, but one can see why Trudeau would target Ford. Ontario Liberals have always considered him to be the province’s No. 1 bogeyman, despite his electoral success.
While the federal carbon tax is a Trudeau policy, last week the PM asserted that it is really Ford who is responsible for it being implemented in Ontario. That would be surprising given that Ford’s government went to the Supreme Court of Canada in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to block the tax.
The way Trudeau tells it, Ford “chose” the carbon tax by cancelling the cap-and-trade regime put in place by the Liberal provincial government. What Ford actually chose was no consumer tax on carbon and he was supported by Ontario voters. Getting rid of cap and trade was one of the few planks in Ford’s brief 2018 platform, which carried him to a majority government. The cap-and-trade Ontario Liberals, by contrast, were reduced to a smoking political ruin.
Perhaps Trudeau thinks voters have forgotten what a dopey scheme cap and trade was. Let’s keep the record straight. In 2016, Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk found that the cap-and-trade plan would only deliver 20 per cent of the province’s reductions target, but at great cost. Ontario joined an existing Quebec and California plan, which allowed emitters to keep emitting in Ontario so long as they bought emissions allowances from companies in the other two jurisdictions. The whole thing would have cost Ontario businesses and households $8 billion between 2017 and 2020 for next to no benefit.
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Cancelling cap-and-trade was one of the best moves Ford ever made.
Having done so much to worsen the housing crisis, Trudeau now wants to one-up Ford on solutions, playing the bold federal leader who can fix things by drawing on his months of experience in the sector.
The “big” issue is how many infill units should be allowed on a single family lot without the need for special approvals. Ford’s government has already passed a three-unit rule. Trudeau insists that it must be four units. If Ontario doesn’t comply, it won’t have access to a new $6-billion federal housing fund.
Ford is adamantly opposed to having the province impose a four-unit rule on all municipalities, saying that people don’t want it, or as he put it, “there’s going to be a lot of shouting and screaming.” Municipalities should decide what’s right for their own people, Ford says. Some, including Toronto, have already agreed to the four-unit rule.
It’s fair to note that Ford didn’t hesitate to tell municipalities that they must allow three units, and has been guilty himself of sometimes heavy-handed changes to municipal planning rules.
The Ontario premier makes mistakes, but at least he learns from them. Wednesday, his government introduced a new package of policies intended to speed housing construction. Key among them was the reversal of a previous rule that would have left municipalities unable to fund the infrastructure that new housing requires. The plan would also enable municipalities to remove approvals from housing plans that have taken too long to develop.
The contrast between the Ford style and the Trudeau style is evident on the dispute over fourplexes. Ford is OK with municipalities making that choice if they want to, but he won’t force them to do it. Trudeau demands his ideas be adopted or he will limit housing money to a province that’s desperate for it. That would seem to undermine his new-found enthusiasm for housing expansion.
The fights Trudeau is having with Ford are over very little. Canada’s future housing supply isn’t going to be dramatically affected by allowing one more unit on a lot. These residential infill projects add housing units in twos or threes, when the country needs millions.
The same might be said of the carbon tax. Trudeau has made it his hill to die on, but a recent report by the Canadian Climate Institute said that the carbon tax will only provide between eight and nine per cent of Canada’s emissions reductions target.
Trudeau has underestimated Ford’s ability to bite back. Using the plain-spoken style that eludes the PM, the premier recently said, “Folks, let’s cut to the chase, this carbon tax has to go or in a year-and-a-half, the prime minister is going.”
That’s Trudeau’s reality, no matter how much he tries to pin the blame on someone else.
Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com
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