And it all started in British Columbia

And it all started in British Columbia

JEFFREY SIMPSON
[e-mail]

VICTORIA

History was made  this week in British Columbia, because the Gordon Campbell/Carole Taylor  budget was the most important provincial one in Canada since  Saskatchewan's CCF introduced medicare.

Nothing was ever the same in health policy after that CCF budget.

Public medicine became the marker planted by reformers. It took years,  and in the teeth of much opposition and hesitation, but that CCF idea  became the norm for the whole country.

So it will be, over time, for the Campbell/Taylor budget. With the  crowd that's running things in Ottawa, and in Edmonton, the battle for a  coherent approach to climate change will be a long, difficult one. But  what the budget did by introducing a carbon tax, offset by recycling the  revenues into lower personal and corporate taxes, will become the
template for climate-change reformers everywhere.

This decision took courage. But something amazing happened within  minutes of the budget: The unimaginable became the norm.

You could see this amazing change in how critics reacted. They  essentially had nothing to say, no alternative to propose, nothing coherent at all.

It was painful to listen to the NDP going on about large emitters being  exempt, when anyone who'd taken a nanosecond to read the budget would  have seen that the cap-and-trade system would target them.

The smart business spokesmen were muted in the criticism. The only  people fulminating were the public-sector unions, but they always fulminate  in B.C. and are taken seriously by very few people.

History has almost never been made in B.C., meaning that very few ideas  have bubbled up in the province and washed back across the country.  British Columbia has never played in Canada the role of California in the U.S. - the incubator of new ideas and the place for experimentation  that grabbed attention elsewhere.

At federal-provincial tables, until the Campbell government arrived,  B.C. was considered lightweight or irrelevant. British Columbia just did  its thing, didn't pay much attention to the rest of Canada, and vice  versa. Now, B.C. has done its thing, and the rest of the country will pay  attention.

The bane of federalism is the search for a unanimous position; the joy  of federalism is allowing provinces to try new approaches that, if they  work, are copied in other jurisdictions.

The Campbell/Taylor budget did many things, but two were of overriding  significance. First, this government committed more political capital,  money and urgency to combatting climate change than any other in Canada  and, with the carbon tax, arguably more than any in North America.  Second, it broke with all the failed policies of Ottawa (and Alberta), and
 clearly said that only by using economic tools - taxes, regulations  and markets - can greenhouse-gas emissions be substantially reduced.

The budget started B.C. down a long path. The carbon tax, beginning at  $10 a tonne and rising to $30 a tonne, will not make much of a dent in  emissions. It will have to be, over time, at least double and probably  triple that price to bring about the changes in production and  consumption required to bring down emissions. But the path had to start  somewhere, some time.

The tax was supplemented by additional measures, some of which will be  more useful than others. But when the tax goes high enough, a  cap-and-trade system is in place, California vehicle emission standards are  applied, and renewables start coursing energy into the grid, then B.C. will  have come to grips with what needs to be done.

Mistakes of design are going to be made. There was no policy need to  send a $100 cheque in June to every British Columbian as a prepayment for future higher fuel costs, when other taxes were being cut. This  payment was all about politics, softening people up for the new tax. At least
 it's only a one-time payment.

We take medicare for granted now, but we forget how hard the battle was at first in Saskatchewan, then across the country. The heresy that was  medicare became a national icon, almost impervious to change.

A carbon tax will never be an icon. But the way it was done in B.C. will be the gold standard from now on.