Robert Silver and Tim Powers have a blog that has been running on the Globe & Mail’s website during the Canadian federal election. Each one of them is a stout partisan: Silver a Liberal, and Powers a Conservative. I’d love to be able to call what is happening on the blog a “debate,” but for a debate to occur, both parties need to be able to come to some basic agreement on the topic at hand. For the most part, this hasn’t happened on the Silver-Powers blog, so the conversation has been dominated by a lot of sniping at one another. 

Yesterday, however, Silver posted one of the most provocative and interesting articles I’ve read by anyone this election cycle. He correctly points out that Stephane Dion’s major policy proposal this election, the Green Shift, is exactly the sort of thing that environmentalists have been demanding for the last 25 years. Finally, we have an election in which serious environmental policy should be the centre of discussion, and yet Canadian environmentalists have dropped the ball in terms of speaking up about the policy. 

Silver writes:

So today the enviros have the election they have been waiting for, they have the platform they have been lobbying for and they have a leader who believes in it to his core.

And yet, from the enviros, silence. It hurts ones ears to listen to the silence that has emanated from the environmental groups since the Green Shift was released, never mind during this campaign.

Oh sure, we heard yesterday – for the first time this campaign – from one who told us “it’s time for a serious debate.” Time for a debate? Well isn’t that nice. I love a good debate…where, when, what’s the resolution and more importantly what the hell are you thinking?

Without writing a treatise on lobbying, let me put it fairly bluntly: When you spend 25 years lobbying for something, a political party offers it up to you – not in part, in full – and you just don’t show up, you are screwed.

If, when you do decide to show up, about three months late to the party, you say it’s to start a “debate” and say there are lots of options available – as if there are three equal sides and a healthy exchange of ideas will work it all out – what do you think happens the next time you ask something of a political party?

You are ignored, is the answer. You are irrelevant. You have shown that you are toothless, all bark no bite – insert your hackneyed expression here but they all add up to irrelevance. Or worse, you are the new wedge that your opponents know they can set opposing political parties up on.

Full disclosure: Silver is an old friend of mine, and though we do not share the same politics, I think that a Pigovian tax scheme such as the Green Shift is an absolute no-brainer. It is exactly the type of fundamental shift that is needed to really address the costs that unchecked carbon emissions place on society as a whole. Nearly every serious environmentalist and economist I have read testify to the wisdom and necessity of a carbon tax.  

Canadian environmentalists, where are you? Are you going to let Stephen Harper’s obfuscations win the day? I respect Jack Layton immensely. He’s my local MP, but I think he’s spouting pure populism on the issue of carbon taxes because it looks like an easy way to win votes. I understand his motives, but I hope that if by some miracle, the NDP and Liberals win enough seats to hold power in a minority government, that they’ll be able to come together on a sensible carbon tax.