Requiem For A Green Plan: The Green Shift As Policy

Up front, lets admit that the skeptics were right; no matter what its advantages as policy, the Green Shift was a tax shift, and a tax shift contains the word "tax", and as such the whole idea was not saleable to too large a proportion of the Canadian electorate.

(As an aside, note that in the post above Kinsella writes:

Sifting through the entrails leaked out to the media, was I wrong to oppose a carbon tax right now? No way. I'm for punishing polluters, not consumers. Cap-and-trade; not this.


Warren knows that's all bullshit. You raise prices on polluters and they raise prices on the consumer that purchases their polluting service. Same person pays in the end. A C&T system is just a slightly more dishonest way of going about the process.

But whatever.)


And lets admit up front that the Tories quite thoroughly mis-represented the GS .


Lets just consider it as policy.

As policy (and I say this as someone who loyally supported the GS while occasionally bringing up caveats), it was flawed in several respects.

For example, the idea that the GS was a wealth redistribution scheme contained an element of truth. Don't ask me; just ask (now ex-) Liberal MP Ken Boshcoff, who wrote that:


The Liberal Party’s Green Shift announced on June 19th marked the most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years. The ‘shift’ will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians.

Now, Mr. Boshcoff didn't come out and actually say that the GS would send Alberta money East, but we all know where the "oil patch" is, don't we?

And as much I wouldn't mind seeing Alberta screwed out of its oily dough, for other reasons it always bothered me that the GS was not a purely environmental initiative. Environmental concerns were being used as an excuse to scare up funds for the broader Liberal platform, about which I personally had far more ambiguous feelings. I mean, my days as a compassionate Lefty are way past gone. I am far more worried these days about saving the bunnies than helping single-moms or the homeless. And I don't care who knows it. Animals are innocent; people are assholes. But whatever.


Similarly, it bothered me that the only sense in which the GS was "revenue neutral" was in the broader metaphoric sense, in that the Government would spend 1$ for each dollar the GS collected.

And the last thing that bothered me was the general laziness with which the plan was introduced. For example, I cheered when, in September, Dion tweaked the GS so as to assuage certain rural concerns over fuel, heating and other costs. But the fact (and I think Paul Wells pointed this out somewhere) that a Carbon Tax would effect certain regions of Canada more than others should have been obvious at the outset. Anyone with a slightest knowledge of the issue should have realized this. So the Dion Liberals offered a hugely complex green plan without having thought it all though, that none of their MPs ever really understood or could explain in detail, and then they went and changed it. The whole thing would have been a bit more bullet proof if these attempts at amelioration had been in the original version.

Personally, I was reminded of the whole Dion/Suzuki thing, where Dion, before he became Lib Leader even, produced a green policy document that contained cut-and-paste material from "The Air We Breathe" put out by the David Suzuki Foundation. For the Libs Enviro Guy, Dion has been pretty sloppy about assembling and presenting his whole political/environmental philosophy.

In any case, I wouldn't want to over-accentuate the negative. In fact the GS, if fully implemented by a Dion government, would have had minuscule negative economic effects. And, in fact, a Cap and Trade system simply = a Carbon tax with twice the bureaucracy. But, beyond the Tory disinformation campaign, there were plenty of aspects of the GS that lent themselves to legitimate criticism. I don't know if it is entirely impossible to run on a tax, but the Libs made it particularly difficult to run on this one.

Battling Green Plans

When you read these two pieces by Don Butler and (The Eco-Libertarian) David Reevely, you will understand why the Libs are having difficulty selling their Green Shift to Canadians: its too complex.

You will also understand why this headline

Tories should present alternative to Green Shift

...expresses a forlorn hope. The Tories intend to keep the final regs of their Turning The Corner plan under wraps until after October 14th: it's too complex too.

Nice Shift

Since I've been complaining about just these aspects of the Liberal Green Shift, I am most happy to hear that

...Dion will announce that part of the $1 billion contingency fund in his plan, designed for tax relief to address the unavoidable costs associated with the carbon tax, will be set aside for truckers, farmers and fishermen.

As to the timing, well, it is unfortunate that the annual Liberal caucus retreat should come on the verge of an election call, and therefore that some media should refer to the changes as "concessions" made in response to negative polling figures. But it was clear from the beginning that the original Green Shift was being put forward as a basis for discussion, and that alterations might be made as a result of concerns expressed during that discussion.

In response to these charges, I like the "we listened" line Dion and Co. are employing. They might also try a variant of the line John Maynard Keynes made famous: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

As an aside, the notion that such concessions "weaken" the plan is surely true but politically unavoidable. Best to get a framework in place and then work at tightening up loopholes. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and all that.

Fishy Green Shift

This I find this a little odd. Green Shift doesn't have its list of "partners" on its website. They give an interesting reason:

For the time being, we have removed the list of those who are part of the Green Shift program. We have done this, in part, to ensure that members of the press are not tempted to contact and disturb our friends during this particularly eventful time.

Just when they are trying to argue that the Liberal Party has harmed its present and future business opportunities, Green Shift is making it more difficult for reporters to access just those people who might be able to confirm/deny this claim--ie their business partners.

Even odder. The cached copy of this same page (which I first noticed a couple of weeks ago) gives a different explanation of the list's absence:

In progress

We are currently undergoing an analysis period, but we plan to be finished this section shortly. Please check back soon, as we hope to have something posted within the next few weeks.

In other words, the list hasn't been there for awhile, but they have taken to blaming its absence on the lawsuit.

Blogging Tories Will Help GreenShift Sue Liberal Party

Nevermind. Maybe more later. Bit of an explanation in comments.

Peter A. Nelson And His Lettuce Fetish

Peter A. Nelson, executive director of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association, has achieved a certain level of notoriety lately for being a carrier of Tory water in their attack on the Dion Green Shift.

Specifically, he has argued that:

Transportation costs would rise with increased fuel costs as a result of carbon taxes, prices of consumer goods and food would rise, inflation would then in turn rise.

The average consumer would see this rise in the form of paying $8 for a head of lettuce at your local grocery store.

How do you like them apples, eh? Except that last year when Maine considered running a toll road through the state to the Canadian Border, he argued that

We cannot continue to discuss Atlantica, Atlantic Gateway or Self Sufficiency until we resolve the issues around transportation infrastructure in and out of the region and the rising costs of transportation which are causing Central Canadian shippers, producers and manufacturers to send their goods to higher population areas along the US eastern seaboard and away from Canada’s east coast in other words we are headed for two things in Atlantic Canada, one being that it will soon cost $8.00 for a head of lettuce in Newfoundland and secondly that we will be able to buy any pair of shoes we want in the region as long as they are black oxfords!

So now we're at $16 a head. But there's more! Yesterday, on the Trucknews website, Mr. Nelson argued that recent increases to fuel surcharges levied by Marine Atlantic would have even more deleterious effects:

In short, a couple of years from now you will be able to buy any pair of shoes you want in Newfoundland as long as they are brown oxfords. The region-wide impact will be this: as manufacturers, producers and shippers pull back from Newfoundland, it then becomes very easy to stop shipping to other costly and less populated areas in Atlantic Canada like Cape Breton, southern Nova Scotia and northern New Brunswick," adding that the day of the $10 head of lettuce in Atlantic Canada is not far away.

So now we're up to $26 for a head of lettuce in Atlantic Canada, and a severe shoe shortage!

A couple of things in conclusion: 1) Mr. Nelson should get some new material, and 2) Dion has been lucky thus far in the quality of his Green Shift opponents. He's going to need to remain lucky, however, if every time he tries to explain The Shift he generates headlines like this one.

h/t Calgary Grit.

First Fruits Of The Green Shift?

Angus Reid Global Monitor) - The governing Conservative party remains ahead in Canada’s political scene, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies released by the Toronto Star. 33 per cent of respondents would vote for the Tories in the next federal election, while 30 per cent would support the opposition Liberal party

Steve got an early look at this poll and has done his usual excellent job with it, so let me just note that the poll was done (online) from June 23rd to 24th, or post Green Shift announcement. Some of the Lib. gains can therefore almost certainly attributed to the unveiling of the new plan. The poll also notes that a minor bounce-back in Dion's fairly dismal personal numbers can be associated with the plan.

Poll is available as .pdf here. Although Steve seems to have seen material not generally available, so definitely give him a read.

PS. Yes I have in the past questioned the methodology of AR online polls. Clearly, clearly, they have changed their ways so as to get a more scientific result.