Wil Andruschak

Calgary-Centre Liberal candidate Heesung Kim says ‘treating the atmosphere like a free dump has to end’

It took less than one day for the environment, and specifically the impacts of Alberta’s oilsands on Canadian air and water, to take centre stage in the 2008 federal election campaign.

The day after he launched his campaign in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s riding of Calgary Southwest, NDP leader Jack Layton flew over the oilsands. Afterwards, he pitched his plan to halt new approvals of oilsands projects. “It’s depressing to see untrammelled development with significant environmental consequences… with no action by the government to address it,” said Layton at a press conference on the bank of the Slave River in Fort Smith, N.W.T.

Now Liberal, Green and NDP candidates in Calgary are pitching their parties’ plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions. “You have to pay to take things to the city dump,” says Heesung Kim, the Liberal candidate in Calgary Centre. “Treating the atmosphere like a free dump has to end…. If you want to dump carbon into the atmosphere there’s going to be a price attached to it.”

The Liberals’ political future rests on their Green Shift plan, which would ultimately tax polluters, including oilsands companies, $40 per tonne of greenhouse gas emitted. That money would then be used to reduce personal and corporate income taxes. The Liberals say Canada’s 700 worst polluters — mostly heavy industry and power plants — would account for most of the Green Shift revenue. “It’s a tax on things that you don’t want so you can reduce the taxes on the things that you do want,” says Kim.

Calgary Centre Conservative candidate Lee Richardson counters that the Green Shift is a “phony environment plan” that’s really a revenue grab — even though the Liberals say every dollar will go back to Canadians. “This simply is another punitive tax to pay for Liberal spending promises,” says Richardson. “It particularly hits us in Alberta…. I think this is a permanent new tax that would destroy jobs and drive up the cost of gas, electricity and everything else you buy.”

Kim says the Conservatives’ attempt to brand the Green Shift as a “tax on everything” is “really irresponsible.” “The reality is anything you do related to carbon emissions is going to increase costs,” she says. “…Our plan is the only one that will take that increased cost and give it back to Canadians.” Under the plan, emissions would be cut by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020.

The Conservatives plan to use intensity targets before eventually moving to hard emissions caps. (Intensity targets, unlike hard caps, allow overall emissions to increase.) Harper has said his government plans to cut Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 60 to 70 per cent of 2006 levels by 2050, and reduce them by 20 per cent by 2020.

“We’ve taken concrete action,” says Richardson, adding that the previous Liberal government left Canada “a long way in the hole” after it signed Kyoto but failed to meet its targets. Richardson says the Conservatives are the only party with a “practical” plan, and adds his constituents are more concerned about issues like crime. “I don’t hear a lot at the doors about environmental issues other than from supporters of the Green Party or other (parties),” he says. The Conservatives also proposed a tax cut on diesel and aviation fuel early in the campaign.

The Greens are proposing a “green tax shift” similar to the Liberal policy, and Calgary Nose-Hill Green candidate Tony Ghaiss Hajj acknowledges it will be a tough pitch in Alberta. “(It’s) very difficult to sort of throw out a slogan and get people attracted to it,” says Hajj. “The only time it will make sense to you is if I sit down with you and say ‘OK, what is your income? Let’s go through it. Let me show you how much you are going to save by the end of this.’”

Many voters, however, don’t have that kind of time, and on September 9 four former Canadian prime ministers — along with businesspeople, writers and academics — issued a joint statement on climate change that warned against overwhelming voters with complexity. “Many proposed greenhouse gas policies are so complex they look like the tax code,” says the statement, signed by Paul Martin, John Turner, Kim Campbell and Joe Clark. The signatories warn that overly complex climate change policies risk “diverting efforts into clever ways to ‘game the system’ and profit from the policies, instead of making the investments and developing the technologies to reduce emissions…. Policies must be as simple and transparent as possible.”

The statement, which is also signed by the Pembina Institute and Calgary author Chris Turner, calls for emission reductions of “more than half, perhaps more than 80 per cent, by the year 2050.”

The NDP, meanwhile, isn’t proposing a carbon tax, but a cap-and-trade system that would set hard caps while allowing polluters to buy carbon credits that haven’t been used by lesser polluters. “That’s really the only way to do it,” says Calgary Centre NDP candidate Tyler Kinch. “If you don’t have hard caps and you just start pricing everything, then you let the market kind of decide what the targets are going to be, and it’s whatever people can afford. Without real targets there’s not going to be actual change happening.” The Greens and Liberals are also proposing a cap-and-trade system that would complement the carbon tax.