EDITORIAL: Ford doesn’t need to pick fights he’s already won
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In political terms, Premier Doug Ford went about cancelling former premier Kathleen Wynne’s cap and trade carbon pricing scheme in the right way.
He ran on doing it in the 2018 Ontario election, and when he won, his Progressive Conservative government scrapped it.
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By contrast, Wynne never mentioned introducing any form of carbon pricing when she ran in the 2014 Ontario election that brought her to power, and shortly after she won, said she wasn’t planning to introduce a carbon tax.
Then, as the leader of a Liberal majority government, she introduced cap and trade, which is a carbon tax by another name.
Wherever one stands on the issue of carbon pricing, in political terms, Ford did what he did in the right way, while Wynne did it in the wrong way.
In legal terms, however, a three-judge panel of Ontario’s divisional court ruled on Friday in a 2-1 split decision that the Ford government broke the law when it failed to hold 30 days of public hearings under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights before scrapping cap and trade.
However, the court didn’t force Ford to revive the cap and trade program because his government later passed legislation that lawfully cancelled the program, without public consultations.
The two environmental groups that launched the court challenge — Greenpeace and its legal representative, Ecojustice — said they had won an important symbolic victory, because the court ruled the Ford government’s actions were illegal.
They also said they never expected the court to force the government to revive cap and trade.
That, of course, would have been outrageous, because just as the former Wynne government had the right to introduce cap and trade, the Ford government had the right to dismantle it.
But the lesson the Ford government should take from this is that there’s a right way to do things and the wrong way, and it will save a lot of court time and public expense if it does things the right way.
A month of public hearings into the government’s decision to scrap cap and trade prior to doing it would have changed nothing, because Ford has a majority government and he had the legal right to dismantle cap and trade.
Given that, it would have been simple to allow a month of public consultation before going ahead.
The other lesson here is that campaigning for office is different from governing.
Campaigning is the equivalent of war-time for politicians and it is not the same thing as governing.
In government, it’s wise to avoid fights and follow the letter of the law, which doesn’t mean avoiding firm stands.
In this case, Ford was perfectly within his rights to take a firm stand on scrapping cap and trade and to do it.
Given that, there was no reason not to do it in the right way.
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