A quick guide to the Conservative ideas that have been seeping back into federal policy

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When the Liberals first took power in 2015, one of their first legislative actions was an all-out drive to reverse seemingly everything that carried the stamp of the prior Conservative government.

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But particularly in the last year, a lot of these Stephen Harper-era policies have started to come back, in part because the Liberal-prescribed alternative eventually became an untenable disaster.

The Carney approach to government is still very different than the Harper approach. But below, find a quick guide to the Conservative ideas that have been seeping back into federal policy.

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Price carbon behind the scenes, where nobody notices

As prime minister, Stephen Harper resisted any notion of a federally mandated consumer carbon price. Canada at the time did have provincial-level carbon taxes (B.C. introduced one of the world’s first in 2008), but the Conservative federal government always rejected the idea of a GST-style carbon levy.

As Harper would explain after his retirement, he saw carbon taxes as a “revenue policy” rather than a climate one. “A carbon tax would have to be astronomically high to have any profound effect on fuels and emissions,” he said in a 2019 interview.

Instead, the one time Harper did flirt with a strategy to price carbon emissions, it was in the form of a “cap and trade” policy. The program was a Conservative pledge during the 2008 election, although it was dropped after the party won a majority in 2011. Either way, the plan was that industries would be given set emissions targets, and if they couldn’t meet them, they would have to buy credits from cleaner industries.

The policy would almost certainly have raised the cost of gas, diesel and other fossil fuels, but in a roundabout way that wasn’t immediately obvious to the average consumer.

This roughly describes the current Liberal approach to emissions policy, although they’re going at it with a bit more gusto. The first action of Prime Minister Mark Carney upon his March 14 swearing-in was to zero Canada’s consumer carbon tax. Instead, his government is pursuing an “industrial carbon price” that is similarly expected to raise prices on everything connected to the burning of fossil fuels, but in a way that won’t show up on receipts or heating bills.

And since we’re on the subject, Carney’s recent pipeline MOU with Alberta could also be seen as a reversal of then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s 2016 cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline — a project that had received Harper approval........

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