Unfortunately/fortunately these things go in cycles. The Conservatives will get into power and we'll remember why we were happy to be rid of them the last time and we'll elect a new Liberal gov't in a decade or so. Industry wants a stable climate change plan so they can make their own longterm plans/investments. The Conservatives will find that most of the people we want to trade with will have some climate change minimum standards we'll have to meet or face trade restrictions. So they won't have any choice, but to do something. They'll just have to dress it up so it doesn't trigger their base.
You are assuming competence on the part of the Federal Conservatives. Not a particularly well founded assumption with PP in charge, but I guess we'll get to find out.
As someone who lives with a very senior carbon-reduction policy person, the liberals are working unfathomably aggressively on solidifying carbon reduction policy that would be extremely difficult to unwind.
PP can blather on about the carbon tax all he wants, but the systems that are being put in place are not easily reversed. He can "axe the tax" but that wouldn't magically absolve the government of the commitments that have been made. He would have to replace it with another policy or else fully dismantle frameworks that govern how the civil service operates moving forward.
A lot of the climate denier stuff is political puppetry. The energy sector is very actively working *with* the government right now on developing legislation moving forward. They're always going to resist being regulated, so having an electorate that doesn't understand policy and is riled up against regulation is useful.
But on a global level, governments aren't stupid and they're very, very actively working on economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions and the energy sector would be absolutely idiotic to not jump on that train as the track is being built.
A conservative government in Canada doesn't have the power to reverse what's happening globally, so PP won't have any inclination to actually slow carbon reduction policy. The vast majority of voters know nothing about it anyway.
Also, Justin won't step down because he's not governing from a place of aiming for reelection. He knows no party can stay in power for much more than 9 years. This is very well established. He's not looking to be electable, he's looking forward to his legacy.
His legacy won't be a series of missteps in a much larger scheme of things. His legacy will be in contrast to Trump. That's how he will be written about in history books, and solidifying federal commitments to carbon reduction policies is a really great way to do that.
The carbon tax is one very specific economic lever that can be pulled. I literally spend a few hours every day hearing about the systems that are currently being developed globally and this shit is fascinating. They're developing an entirely new international system of trade. It's fucking wild.
This shit is moving so fast and with a level of interdepartmental collaboration that I have never seen. And it's not because Canada is leading the way in any way, these systems will come online and we just have to keep up.
Any country that doesn't get their domestic system in order for the global trade of carbon credits will be fucked, so everyone is doing this, it's just so fucking complicated and not yet hammered out, so virtually no one understands it enough to even talk much about it.
The info is out there, but I hear DH almost daily explaining this stuff to senior government officials.
Take a look at CFDs, CCFDs, and ITMOs
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/emerging-fundamentals-climate-mitigation-through-itmo-transactions-under-parisThis is an international economic trade system. PP has zero interest in swimming against this kind of stream. So yeah, he can "axe the tax," but there's no way he bothers pushing back against the massive machine that is going to be remarkably profitable for Canada because we're so well positioned to trade within this global system.
PP is dumb, but he's not *that* dumb.
He would have to blow every ounce of political capital that he has trying to unwind what the liberals are currently putting in place and the public wouldn't even understand what the fuck he was trying to do, all to disadvantage the Canadian economy.
Not gonna happen.
And the energy sector (note that many of these companies now identify as "energy" companies, not O&G companies) are very very actively engaged in determining their role in these new systems moving forward. They smell money and they're eager to cement their place in getting it. Now they're just negotiating the details of what *exactly* can generate a credit and what can't.
They don't want carbon reduction systems stopped. They're not idiots they know peak oil is coming. They know they need to adapt. They'll fight regulation of their industry tooth and nail to squeeze every ounce of profit out of what's left, but they're not actually fighting progress. They're very invested as stakeholders in the next phase.
The media makes it sound like we're still in the dark ages of climate change denial and sitting around doing nothing except for the much maligned carbon tax. But let's not forget that this wheel started turning before the Liberals even took power. Much of the framework for emissions reduction that we're still working with today was set up by the Harper Conservatives, even while he was muzzling climate scientists because he didn't like his particular ways being questioned. That's just what he was like, he ruled top-down, which is rare for Canadian prime ministers, they tend to give the civil service a pretty wide berth to do its thing.
PP is much dumber than Harper. I can't see him being a top-down prime minister because he doesn't really have much of his own ideology. Harper knew exactly what he wanted to be doing, and he had solid support of his own party. PP is a candidate that the part aggressively bullied out of even running in past leadership races, and they basically ended up with him out of attrition.
It's been a PC leadership Russian roulette where it was just a matter of time that the Libs were in too long and whatever candidate was loaded in the barrel when the inevitable loss happened would be the next leader.
And we ended up with *that* guy, who no one has ever liked.
I don't envy him either. It's a BAD time to take over. We all know that it doesn't matter if you inherited a problem, as leader you will get blamed for it.
And he's going to inherit the federal government after Trudeau already largely improved inflation, so he won't get credit for any further progress on that. But he will inherit the housing crisis and collapse of the medical system, which cannot be resolved by federal measures alone. That will require exquisite cooperation with the provinces, which, good fucking luck with that.
He also can't get rid of all the immigrants folks are angry about, so those hostilities will increase and they'll be too valuable a voting population to fully alienate...so...
Yeah, it's not going to be a pleasant job for him. Trudeau came in with the support of an established (corrupt) system of chronies who have been handling this kind of shit for decades since his father. He was surrounded by highly effective (and yes, corrupt) and very very smart people who could get shit done.
PP is propped up by a chaotic band of in-fighters, most of whom would probably happily kill him in his sleep.
I really don't envy that guy, it's really hard to be prime minister when you're dumb and have no friends and you need the provinces to play nice.
It's gonna be a shit show. But the carbon reduction policies will just keep on trucking in the background. That's not my worry at all. I'm worried about the collapse of the medical system and the raging opioid crisis, which will likely get worse under PP and directly impact a lot of us.
