Yes, it was John Baird's “Turning the Corner” plan. It was not bad. Certainly, it did have potential mechanisms for putting a price on carbon. It really did seem to want to address in a broad, thorough way what was going on. It was not terribly well-received outside of the party itself. Some of my colleagues have certainly argued and maybe unfairly criticized it simply because the rhetoric of the day was so heated around this stuff that there was just not a lot of ground being given, but that kind of fell by the wayside.
Then, as a government, the Conservatives spent most of their time using the phrase “job-killing carbon tax” every single time that the subject came up. I think it was an extraordinarily negative thing to do to the public discourse: to frame the essential response needed to climate change nationally as a thing that was trying to destroy the economy.
What we've found in the limited evidence that we have to date—British Columbia is the best—is that putting a price on carbon is not a drag on the economy in any way whatsoever. There's no real evidence of that. I think that a lot of the opposition now is basically looking for other ways to put prices on carbon without saying “tax” because they sort of recognized that putting a price on pollution is a smart thing to do, but that they can't say it anymore because they've spent 10 years talking about how it was the worst idea on earth. You hear that, certainly, from some of the premiers and would-be premiers now when they talk about it. I think that it's an enormous disservice to Canadians to be framing the debate in those terms.
I don't think that the Conservatives are entirely alone on this. I think governments of all stripes over the last 10 to 15 years have taken political positions that don't necessarily match up with where they claim to want to go. Everyone now kind of claims that climate change is a serious problem and that we have to do something about it. However, we're never willing to kind of say, “Hey, let's all agree that there's a baseline”—and this is something that I talk about in that Globe piece—the same way we agree on the baseline that universal health care is a good thing, that it's good for Canadians to not have to pay for health care and to not go broke because they get sick.
Similarly, not having carbon pollution be free is a good thing. If we intend to do anything about climate, at some point it has to be punished. I think arguing about whether it's a tax or a price has really fed some very reactionary politics that have not helped the debate at all.
I'm not sure if I've answered the question thoroughly, but I think—