With the Green vote melting away and Gordo's arrogant and sexist performance in the debate, a pro-carbon tax NDP would have been able to take enough additional soft Green votes to win the most seats on May 12.
Doubtful. The role that the carbon tax played was to deflect attention from other issues that could have made a difference in the vote, probably not so much capturing more green vote, as in energizing more of the voters who stayed away from the poles to turn out in vote for the NDP.
Actually, a pro-carbon tax NDP might have gathered even fewer votes. It wasn't that the NDP opposed the carbon tax, which was the sensible thing to do, both for the environment and socially, but that it opposed it in the wrong way and let it muddy up the campaign.
Let's face it, the central NDP campaign was poorly run and failed to create enthusiasm in the electorate. Choosing the wrong approach to opposing the carbon tax was only part of it.
The NDP needs to put forward a visionary and far-reaching platform on what a low or zero-carbon economy will look like, and why the NDP's approach to reducing GHG emissions is fairer and more comprehensive that the Liberals'.
No doubt about that. Unfortunately a low or zero-carbon economy will be a smaller reverse growth economy, and that is something that goes against eons of economic thinking and what people have been condidtioned to expect.
It must be an approach that includes strict limits on the extraction and processing of carbon fuels, and on imports, and fairness would require price controls and rationing.
The only really effective and sure way to reduce carbon use is to directly limit the amount of carbon fuel available. Price fiddling and other economic shell games are insufficient if not outright laughable.
