Ontario climate change strategy a Frankenstein monster

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By Ben Eisen
and Kenneth P. Green
The Fraser Institute

Ontario’s climate change strategy is just another example of the tax-and-spend approach that has undermined the province’s economy for years.

A recent opinion column from the Brookings Institution in the United States observes (based on the vast laboratory that is California) that cap-and-trade is a flawed strategy for reducing carbon emissions.

Ben Eisen
Ben
Eisen

Unfortunately, this policy is at the heart of Ontario’s recently unveiled climate change strategy.

Cap-and-trade establishes limits on greenhouse gas emissions (the cap). Businesses that can’t afford to reduce emissions are able to trade for credits with those that can.

According to the Brookings authors, such schemes are increasingly “complex, subject to manipulation and giveaways, and as an engine for the expansion of government.”

In Ontario, the government has compounded the confusion by not specifying how the initial permits will be allocated. Historically, emission credits have been allocated politically, giving governments vast powers to favour industries and activities they like, and punish those they don’t.

A second problem with Ontario’s plan is that it will take even more money away from already heavily-taxed consumers and businesses. Indeed, much of the proceeds from the cap-and-trade scheme will fuel more government spending – the last thing Ontario’s economy needs.

Ken Green
Ken
Green

Optimally designed carbon pricing policies use the resulting revenues to reduce, dollar-for-dollar, economically harmful taxes, such as personal and corporate income taxes. And the carbon price replaces, not augments, other carbon regulations. Ontario won’t give all the revenue back to taxpayers but will instead fund pet projects, including initiatives to “support cycling and walking.”

But there’s more bad news – beyond the problems with its cap-and-trade scheme, other elements of Ontario’s climate strategy are unnecessarily complex and economically harmful.

For example, experts on all sides of the climate debate agree that the best way to at least theoretically reduce emissions is to simply attach a price to them. Then simply allow individuals and businesses to respond to the price by making emissions reductions wherever it’s least expensive to do so.

Ontario’s plan ignores this consensus advice by interfering in the decision-making of individuals and private companies through a host of regulations and targeted subsidies that favour producers of specific products. For example, the government plans to subsidize electric vehicles up to $14,000 per car.

In theory, carbon pricing allows governments to eliminate targeted subsidies. But the myriad of energy regulations and targeted subsidies in Ontario (which are de facto carbon emission regulations) are not scheduled for repeal. Instead of replacing harmful regulations, cap-and-trade is simply being layered on top with new regulations and subsidies.

Ontario’s climate change plan is a sort of Frankenstein monster. The government has dug up and stitched together parts of various bad ideas that ought to have been left dead in the ground. It combines a tax-and-spend approach to government finances with a micro-managerial approach to regulation and subsidies. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, the result is unlovely.

Opinions vary on the urgency of reducing emissions in a comparatively small jurisdiction such as Ontario, in the absence of comprehensive global co-operation. And opinion varies on the amount of economic pain we should endure to achieve emissions reduction.

Regardless of one’s views on these questions, hopefully all can agree that if a government decides to proceed with an ambitious plan to reduce carbon emissions, it ought to do so in the most transparent and least economically damaging manner possible.

Sadly, Ontario’s climate plan fails this test miserably.

Ben Eisen and Kenneth P. Green are analysts with the Fraser Institute.

Ben and Ken are Troy Media Thought Leaders. Why aren’t you?

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

By Ben Eisen

Ben Eisen is a Senior Fellow in Fiscal and Provincial Prosperity Studies and former Director of Provincial Prosperity Studies at the Fraser Institute. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto and an MPP from the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute Mr. Eisen was the Director of Research and Programmes at the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax. He also worked for the Citizens Budget Commission in New York City, and in Winnipeg as the Assistant Research Director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Mr. Eisen has published influential studies on several policy topics, including intergovernmental relations, public finance, and higher education policy.

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