Earth Equity News

Canadian Liberal Party's Green Shift, Promising but Unlikely. By Stephen Marche, The Nation, October 7, 2008. "The upcoming [Canadian] election, called for October 14th of this year, has put one of the boldest and most important policy initiatives in global politics on the table: the Liberal Party's 'Green Shift.' The policy would make carbon taxation the principal source of government revenue. And though Stéphane Dion, the Liberal party leader, claims the new tax would be revenue neutral -- involving deep cuts to corporate and personal income tax--the shift would completely restructure the Canadian economy around its environmental policy. Al Gore could ask for no more. What makes such a profound change possible is that the Liberals would only need a minority government to make it a reality--the Greens and the New Democrats, the parties to its left, have even more radical environmental policies on their platforms. Dion's opponent on the right, however, is the current Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper... [whose] environmental troglodytism can in part be attributed to the fact that he's from Alberta, Canada's answer to Texas, which has been booming during the recent rise in oil prices due to huge resources in its tar sands and its proximity to insatiable American markets. He also clearly believes that, in the end, Canadians will choose doing nothing over fundamentally altering their way of life... Harper thinks it's good politics to bet on dirtiness, largely because he sees Dion [, correctly, as an ineffective partly leader and]... nobody knows what, exactly, would happen if instead of taxing income we started taxing carbon emissions; predicting the future behavior of 34 million people to a completely different way of life is impossible. The specifics are wooly exactly because no one has ever attempted such a thing before. And given the current economic crisis, a dive into fiscal uncertainty may have less appeal that it might otherwise."