And it all started in British Columbia
JEFFREY SIMPSON
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
VICTORIA
History was made this week in British Columbia, because the Gordon Campbell/Carole Taylor budget was the most important provincial one in Canada since Saskatchewan's CCF introduced medicare.
Nothing was ever the same in health policy after that CCF budget.
Public medicine became the marker planted by reformers. It took years, and in the teeth of much opposition and hesitation, but that CCF idea became the norm for the whole country.
So it will be, over time, for the Campbell/Taylor budget. With the crowd that's running things in Ottawa, and in Edmonton, the battle for a coherent approach to climate change will be a long, difficult one. But what the budget did by introducing a carbon tax, offset by recycling the revenues into lower personal and corporate taxes, will become the
template for climate-change reformers everywhere.
This decision took courage. But something amazing happened within minutes of the budget: The unimaginable became the norm.
You could see this amazing change in how critics reacted. They essentially had nothing to say, no alternative to propose, nothing coherent at all.
It was painful to listen to the NDP going on about large emitters being exempt, when anyone who'd taken a nanosecond to read the budget would have seen that the cap-and-trade system would target them.
The smart business spokesmen were muted in the criticism. The only people fulminating were the public-sector unions, but they always fulminate in B.C. and are taken seriously by very few people.
History has almost never been made in B.C., meaning that very few ideas have bubbled up in the province and washed back across the country. British Columbia has never played in Canada the role of California in the U.S. - the incubator of new ideas and the place for experimentation that grabbed attention elsewhere.
At federal-provincial tables, until the Campbell government arrived, B.C. was considered lightweight or irrelevant. British Columbia just did its thing, didn't pay much attention to the rest of Canada, and vice versa. Now, B.C. has done its thing, and the rest of the country will pay attention.
The bane of federalism is the search for a unanimous position; the joy of federalism is allowing provinces to try new approaches that, if they work, are copied in other jurisdictions.
The Campbell/Taylor budget did many things, but two were of overriding significance. First, this government committed more political capital, money and urgency to combatting climate change than any other in Canada and, with the carbon tax, arguably more than any in North America. Second, it broke with all the failed policies of Ottawa (and Alberta), and
clearly said that only by using economic tools - taxes, regulations and markets - can greenhouse-gas emissions be substantially reduced.
The budget started B.C. down a long path. The carbon tax, beginning at $10 a tonne and rising to $30 a tonne, will not make much of a dent in emissions. It will have to be, over time, at least double and probably triple that price to bring about the changes in production and consumption required to bring down emissions. But the path had to start somewhere, some time.
The tax was supplemented by additional measures, some of which will be more useful than others. But when the tax goes high enough, a cap-and-trade system is in place, California vehicle emission standards are applied, and renewables start coursing energy into the grid, then B.C. will have come to grips with what needs to be done.
Mistakes of design are going to be made. There was no policy need to send a $100 cheque in June to every British Columbian as a prepayment for future higher fuel costs, when other taxes were being cut. This payment was all about politics, softening people up for the new tax. At least
it's only a one-time payment.
We take medicare for granted now, but we forget how hard the battle was at first in Saskatchewan, then across the country. The heresy that was medicare became a national icon, almost impervious to change.
A carbon tax will never be an icon. But the way it was done in B.C. will be the gold standard from now on.
