- Kelly McParland: Rae and Ignatieff -- 'Don't believe what we said about the Green Shift'
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Call me hopelessly naive, call me an innocent, call me a babe in the woods. But I can’t help being somewhat agog at the speed and finality with which Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff have repudiated the Green Shift.
Remember in the dying days of the election, when things were looking bad for the Liberals and both Mr. Rae and Mr. Ignatieff -- trying to do some much-needed damage control -- hinted that maybe Stéphane Dion’s carbon tax plan needn’t be imposed come hell or high water, as Mr. Dion was insisting?
- National Post editorial board: Green Shift gets a well-deserved burial
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The Liberals’ Green Shift carbon tax died weeks ago, even before October’s national vote. Still, both front-runners for the Liberal leadership have decided to throw the corpse under the bus just to make certain it is well and truly dead. Speaking with reporters this week, both Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff pledged not to reintroduce the idea should they be chosen to head their party next spring.
Green Shift — outgoing Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s scheme for shifting Canadians’ tax burden from income to carbon emissions — must rank among the worst campaign themes in modern Canadian history, right up there with Robert Stanfield’s wage and price controls in the 1974 election and the fallout from Brian Mulroney’s GST inherited by Kim Campbell in 1993. It was needlessly complex, contained numbers that did not add up, was unlikely to produce the environmental benefits claimed for it and, above all, appeared to voters as just another cash-grab by big government.
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