You don’t win votes by promising a new tax. And calling the tax “revenue neutral” just gets a laugh from cynical voters.
Stéphane Dion learned these lessons tonight. Gordon Campbell might be taking notes.
Dion would have been better off if he had listened to Bruce Anderson.
Back in May, the Liberal leader was making noises about favouring a carbon tax. Anderson, the president of Harris/Decima, told The Tyee at the time that a carbon tax could help revive the federal Liberal party – if it was presented properly.
However, Anderson said, making a carbon tax the “leading edge” of a political campaign was not a great idea.
Dion went ahead and made the carbon-tax based Green Shift the leading edge of his campaign.
He got thumped.
True, Dion had a lot going against him in this campaign and his poor performance can’t be blamed entirely on the Green Shift. But arguing for a carbon tax obviously didn’t do him much good.
Economists tell us a carbon tax is good way to cut climate-changing greenhouse gases. Voters have been, to put it mildly, unconvinced.
They sent some clear messages about the tax tonight.
1) A carbon tax is hard to understand, especially when the guy who is trying to sell it is less than proficient in one of the official languages.
2) A carbon tax is easy to distort. The Conservatives successfully sold the Green Shift as a “tax on everything,” which it wasn’t. And they never mentioned the promised tax cuts that would offset the carbon tax.
3) Few people understand – and even fewer believe – promises that the tax will be revenue neutral.
The Green Shift plan was spelled out in thorough detail. Perhaps overwhelmingly so. “A tax on everything” is so much easier to understand.
It didn’t help that Dion was trying to sell the Green Shift during a period of high taxes and a plunging stock market. But the problems with the carbon tax as a potential vote-getter go deeper than that.
Back in May, Anderson said Canadians will accept a carbon tax if it’s presented as part of a broad package of environmental policies.
But the phrase “carbon tax” is a hard sell, he said.
“Carbon is a technical term that is associated directly with a symptom of the broader environmental problem and that limits its effectiveness from a communications standpoint,” Anderson said.
“Tax is a term that everybody knows and understands and not too many people feel all that good about.”
As Anderson’s comments suggest, the Green Shift was in deep trouble when the Conservatives framed the debate as being about taxes, rather than the environment.
As pollster Conrad Winn told The Tyee, “No politician has ever been able to thrive by talking about taxes.”
Winn, the founder of COMPAS Public Opinion, said the Liberals’ reliance on the Green Shift as the centrepiece of their campaign gave too much credence to voters’ willingness to say they care about fighting climate change.
“It greatly overstates public opinion to put too much into respondents’ apparently pro-environmental attitudes,” Winn said. “We all know that politicians suffer from hypocrisy, but voters are human too.”
Winn said voters don’t understand how a carbon tax works and simply don’t trust promises that the money collected by the carbon tax will be returned in income tax cuts.
“Voters have too much experience being promised one thing and experiencing another,” Winn said.
“The only part of the carbon tax that’s clear is the word tax.”
Will B.C.’s carbon tax drag down Premier Gordon Campbell’s Liberals? Based on the federal results, Campbell should be worried.
Tom Barrett is a contributing editor at The Tyee.
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David Lewis
3 years ago
Tax post morte
James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Center is saying if we aren't on a completely different road in a few years on things like this, if we haven't implemented carbon taxes or the equivalent price on carbon with cap and trade at a level very much higher than anything any politician has stood for anywhere, until we start seeing emissions start going down, the chances for any generation after us salvaging anything like what we inherited in the way of a stable climate on the planet we grew up on are greatly diminished.
He's saying its too big of a job to turn things around if it gets left even a few years longer.
He's the most highly regarded climatologist on Earth.
I'm sure that the economic concerns everyone has are completely justified, but it does seem that a way will be found to grease the wheels of international finance, now that the governments have stumbled on the idea to "recapitalize" the banks to simply replace, with our cash, the toxic paper Wall Street palmed off on them and whatever paper their own preposterous practices allowed them to create for themselves, that has all been thrown into the furnace. It makes sense that the governments have taken an ownership position, and it does tend to restore one's faith, a bit, that an apparent catastrophe could be dealt with this quickly, if indeed it has.
But if the worst happened, I suppose that could mean ten years of 25% unemployment, some blue chip stocks going down to 10% of their value and staying there, with recovery coming only with the approach of the equivalent now of something like WWII. Who thinks this is possible, even as everyone wonders, can it happen?
Now even this worst case which did happen, leaves little evidence around for us to see now. Civilization recovered.
What Hansen says is the planet is in the process of being committed to no stable shoreline on any timeframe relevant to human beings and an eventual overall sea level rise of 260 feet as all ice disappears from both poles, wholesale global climate change the 50,000 square miles of dead pine trees in BC is the tiniest first taste of, such significant species loss it means the end of this age of life on Earth and in the oceans, and the very significant increase in international tension change of such magnitude implies. There isn't going to be recovery from this.
Our descendants face rapid change, rapid deterioration, extreme competition, and it is hard thinking about anything but "when", when the subject of war comes to mind. Gwynne Dyer has made a study of climate, he says he talked to many of the top people over a year or more of study, and he has been writing for around a year putting out a column every once in a while and he is about to publish a book - he's a military analyst, look him up for his take on likely scenarios of tension leading to war.
So. What stood out for me as I observed these pioneering efforts some politicians put in asking voters to vote for a new type of tax aimed at addressing a problem most say they would like to do something about?
I've got the Conservative "Dion's tax on everything" pamphlet in front of me as I write. This is very brutal. It hits me in some very deep way. A feeling of dismay comes up and worse. This is the kind of thing I didn't want to see any of and it is here.
Moving along to lighter matters. After experiencing the opportunism of the provincial NDP first hand I had no expectations of Layton in regard to carbon taxes. I got less. Layton's better plan may prove to be the better political plan if someone were to achieve power campaigning on implementing it, only because it could be sold if carbon taxes could not, but his average Canadian would quickly find out that effective action on climate would involve him and her, and it would cost.
I had a very personal invitation to pay attention to the NDP policy as it evolved at the provincial level. Corky Evans rose in the Legislature to make his speech in response to the Campbell government Throne Speech where it was announced he was going to do something on climate, and Corky dedicated that speech to me.
He told the Legislature about how I had been waiting for action on this issue for twenty years, and he and his party were serving notice to Campbell that they suspected the Liberals were not sincere. Corky's greatest concern was that Campbell and his party were just cynically announcing action in an effort to capitalize on polls saying Canadians suddenly cared and wanted action, that Corky and the NDP suspected strongly, would not be forthcoming.
Corky and his party under their Leader Carole James have parlayed widespread misunderstanding about what a carbon tax is, as well as the widespread resistance to more taxes and the very widespread distrust of those in power into a new dawn for themselves. What Corky said about the Liberals when he accused them of the type of opportunism that his party practiced after inviting me to a front row seat to make sure I observed was this:
"If this is spin, this is the biggest lie... [he got the word "lie" in, then retracted, saying "we aren't allowed to say lie in this building"] then he said: "if this is spin, it is the largest immoral gesture to come into this building in a long time"
I didn't get into activism on climate because I thought I could take this sort of thing. It comes to me that I couldn't have expected anything else. But he took me in, a tiny bit, as I observed and assessed and studied, maybe they do mean they want to start doing something about this at last.
And then there were the environment groups and activists. How many environment groups asked for the climate refund so they could put it into their own general revenue? Did anyone see the need to help explain to the voter, by example, how a carbon tax was intended to work? Suzuki had a button on his site. "Send your climate dividend in."
Bill Rees published his views in the Tyee. How would you expect someone to bring in a carbon tax Bill? Where would you have started? Why did you feel it so necessary to call it the BC carbon tax shell game? I actually debated with the Building Trades who wanted no part of carbon taxes and they were using you to support their position that their members should get a free ride while others looked after this problem.
Its a big world. I suppose it was a bit preposterous to think that Canada could lead North America, as Campbell is doing and as Dion tried to do. When the US acts, we'll move into line. Bay Street knows this and is bracing itself, especially as the Obama Administration looms as more real.
G West
3 years ago
Opportunism of the provincial NDP?
Have you read the Campbell Tax Bill?
You might be surprised to know that it’s been said that Carole Taylor hadn't even read the Regulation before she signed it.
Ever wonder why she wanted out so badly?
If you have, you'll note it doesn't affect either airlines or cruise ships...if Campbell had done something 'positive' with the tax and spent it helping to insulate houses, speed up the development of transit, encourage shifts to natural gas as truck fuel, spend on social housing to help force realty prices down then he might deserve some credit.
As it is the Campbell Tax won't affect Carbon production, get cars off the road or reduce the amount of home heating fuel we use - furthermore, at the same time he's pretending to care about the environment he's instituted a two price structure for electricity - arguably the cleanest fuel we have.
He deserves a black eye from every citizen next May - the pretence that he cares about anything but himself is risible.
Read the bill, it's nothing but a money-laundering scheme worthy of the cosa nostra.
Campbell couldn't lead his dog to dinner.