Carbon pricing is now both a moral and legal right for fighting climate change

The appeals court of Ontario has handed what is yet another win for the environment, and our country, which is seeing warming happening at twice the rate as the world on average, record wildfires in some parts of the country, record flooding in other parts, depleting fishing stocks on our coasts, the spread of disease and pest going northward, and the anticipation of climate migrants fleeing worse-off coastal countries.

The fact of the matter is, carbon pricing is NOT a tax, according to both Saskatchewan's and Ontario's top courts and despite what its politically-motivated opponents say. The other fact is, the way the federal government is applying carbon pricing, it is the most efficient way to attribute the external costs related to burning fossil fuels, according to economists. Regulations and targeting high emitters in certain industries, as the Conservatives want to do, is also a form of carbon pricing, but it is far from efficient or fair, and the admin costs of such a plan would be the opposite of conservative.

I trust that this latest loss to the right-wing populist premiers lacking any real leadership-skills who are fighting against efficient, market-based carbon pricing, means we can finally pivot to how we can build on top of what the federal government is doing to lower Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. The upcoming federal election in October should be about how we are going to move this great country forward instead of backwards like Andrew Scheer wants to do.

After all, Canada has been a leader on the world stage since our inception, from Alexander Graham Bell's inventing of the telephone, to our fight against fascism in World War II, to the discovery of insulin for those suffering from diabetes, to helping end ozone-depleating CFCs with the Montreal protocol. Lets continue being a leader and make our future generations proud of our courageous efforts to fight climate change.