News that the freshly announced Ontario cap and trade program is expected to raise $1.9 billion annually as soon as 2017, making it the single largest source of new provincial revenue, played easily into a cynics’ view of the program as a simple provincial government “cash grab.”
Most people, at least according to recent polls exploring Canadians’ feelings on the issue, are in favour of taking action on the environment and dealing with the impact of climate change—even if it does cost us more. But judging from the anecdotal feedback in coffee shops across the nation, we all still would prefer if someone else to picked up the tab.
Analysis of the Ontario cap and trade program, crafted and linked to the Western Climate Initiative that includes Quebec and California, suggests that the average household could be footing the bill to the tune of about $13 per month more in energy and fuel costs by 2017. Gas prices are set to go up by 4.3 cents per litre, while monthly heating costs for the average home are projected to climb by $5, and these are estimates that are based on the current price of carbon, a price that is set to rise steadily over the next few years as the carbon caps drop.
There is some putative good news, the Ontario budget has claimed that under the plan electricity bills will drop by $2 a month—but the magic wand by which that will come to pass remains shrouded in the political mists. The government has promised that newly raised $1.9 billion will be spent on initiatives to cut greenhouse gases through investments in public transit, clean technology and making homes and businesses more energy efficient—all welcome news to be sure.
Meanwhile, played against the backdrop of the cap and trade announcement by Ontario, Canada’s First Ministers have sat down at the table in their first meeting in a decade, coming out of their two-day palaver with an agreement for a plan to develop a framework for climate policy action. Considering how wide the policy ravines the 14 ministers had to bridge to reach that common ground, that they managed to come out of the room with any kind of coherent agenda is quite remarkable and bodes well for the future, but the final analysis of that agreement will not be clear until the four working groups set up in the agreement make their deliberations public next October.
Still, a pan-Canadian policy plan has been promised for early 2017.
If any of these optimistic first steps are to have any chance to succeed, they will need to be accompanied by an almost unprecedented level of transparency and accountability both in the collection of the carbon costs and in the distribution of the largesse flowing from the consumers’ pockets into government coffers.
While the federal government has provided at least the appearances of a more open and approachable regime than that practiced by their iron-fisted predecessors, the embattled Ontario government has given the appearance of moving in the opposite direction.
Democracy has always been messy. It is a difficult system prone to short-sighted decisions and fraught with opportunities for disaster with every policy misstep that opposition critics are quick to exploit—the temptation to hide behind bureaucratic obfuscation grows more intense with each day in power. But if the consumers of this province are going to be asked to pay their share of saving humanity from its own worst excesses, they will need to be convinced that their hard earned money is going where they government has promised. That requirement holds true for both the Ontario and the pan-Canadian initiative.
