The problem is that the Harper government has been all over the map regarding its stance on energy policy. It's hard to tell exactly what, if anything, the Conservative energy policy on oil and gas regulation is supposed to be.
Just look at what Aaron Wherry has found...$1:
Gary Doer, our ambassador to the United States, would like U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to know that Alberta imposes a “carbon fee.” Or, rather, Doer is apparently concerned that this fact, among others, has not been appropriately noted by American environmental authorities.
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“The EPA chose to ignore that the oil sands are produced in the only jurisdiction supplying oil to the United States that has imposed a carbon fee, which is used to fund clean-energy technologies,” Doer writes.
The day before that letter was delivered to Kerry, Finance Minister Joe Oliver spoke with the CBC and, in that interview, he was asked about establishing a price on carbon and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s position on pricing carbon and the federal government’s role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. (The interviewer, mistakenly, I think, refers to Trudeau’s plan as a national price on carbon).
“You don’t achieve prosperity by adding to the tax burden,” Oliver explained. “And a carbon tax would be a tax on everything and it would impact consumers, it would impact investors, it would impact everything that we buy and sell . . . A carbon tax has not proved effective in achieving its stated purpose, but it does have a negative impact on economic growth and job creation, and I think it’s the wrong policy. The $20-billion NDP carbon tax and the Liberal plan is really irresponsible at any time, but it’s particularly dangerous at this moment in our recovery.”
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On Jan. 29, the House of Commons debated a Liberal motion calling for annual meetings between the Prime Minister and the premiers.
Here, in the midst of that debate, is Maxime Bernier, the minister of state for small business, telling Liberal MP John McCallum that a price on carbon and a carbon tax are the same thing. And here is Paul Calandra, parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, using the phrases “price on carbon” and “carbon tax” interchangeably.
Less than two months before Trudeau’s speech in Calgary, Prime Minister Stephen Harper granted an interview to the CBC. On the subject of his contention that any further regulation of the oil-and-gas sector must be done in concert with the United States, Harper was asked whether he had proposed anything to the Americans. In response, he pointed to Alberta’s system:
“This is the tech-fund price carbon levy and the, the, it’s not a levy. It’s a price and there’s a tech fund in which, in which the private sector makes investments,” the Prime Minister explained. “So look, that’s what Alberta has done, that’s a model that’s available, but you know, as I say, we’re very open to see progress on this on a continental basis. I’ve said that repeatedly to our partners in North America and we look forward to working on that.”
As I wrote in December, there can be some haggling over how to describe Alberta’s policy. For the record, the provincial government says it puts a “price on carbon.”
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So a price on carbon is a bad thing and a price on carbon is a carbon tax and a tax on carbon is unproven as a means of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and it will have a negative effect on the economy, but Alberta’s price on carbon is an argument for approving the Keystone XL pipeline and a model that the Harper government has recommended to the United States for continental coordination.
The history here is rich. In 2008, the Conservatives supported pricing carbon through cap-and-trade, while opposing a carbon tax. In 2011, the Conservatives decided that cap-and-trade, at least as proposed by the NDP, was equivalent to a carbon tax.
So far, Trudeau has only expressed support for a price on carbon. For that, the Conservatives accuse him of supporting a job-killing carbon tax. But the government seems vaguely willing to accept Alberta’s price on carbon as a “model” and at least touts that price as a thing the American government should consider when deciding whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. And oh, by the way, there were negotiations between the federal government and the provinces that would have used Alberta’s price on carbon as a model at the national level for the oil-and-gas sector.
The Harper government now claims that nothing more should be done about emissions from the oil-and-gas sector unless the United States wants to act in concert, but there is much that should be explained to defend that stance.
“There hasn’t been a great deal of subtlety in talking about carbon pricing,” Peter Kent observed two years ago.
And then there's the
back and forth by Harper and his ministers on "polluter pay" and regulations, as cited by PressProgress and ridiculed by Sun Media bureau chief David Akin, who isn't exactly the kind of guy who'd post at Rabble.ca.
Links and sources are available in the posts themselves, but it does illustrate how inconsistent the Harper government has been on the issue.
People are always telling me how much I know about politics, but frankly I can't make heads or tails of what kind of policy Harper and his ministers are in favour of. First they support "polluter pay", then cap and trade, then Alberta's carbon levy and now they don't want to impose any regulations at all? It'd be one thing if the government gave a more coherent reason why it's changing its mind on a policy, but it's been back and forth on regulations for years now, and in any event the government rarely changes course on an announced policy, much less explain why it's doing it...
Finally, here's what is, in my mind, the million-dollar question: how does this look to energy companies and investors, who vastly prefer stability to uncertainty?
CKA Elite 
