A leading Canadian conservative is being labelled a sellout for endorsing a carbon price to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Preston Manning, described as the “founding father of the modern conservative movement” in Canada, recently signed on as a member of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, a five-year effort to look at principles governments can adopt to promote economic growth that benefits the environment. Then last week, he published an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail that contained “a few suggestions” for communicating on climate change.
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“The ‘good idea’ the commission seeks to advance—and that I wholeheartedly support—is that for any economic activity, especially the production of energy, we should identify its negative environmental impacts, devise measures to avoid, mitigate, or adapt to those impacts, and include the costs of those measures in the price of the product,” he wrote. “It’s the idea behind using carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
The conservative Sun TV network branded Manning a “fake conservative,” with host Ezra Levant accusing him of “using ‘jedi mind tricks’ and ‘linguistic trojan horses’ to ‘bamboozle the oil patch,’ all while ‘using his 1990s reputation to fundraise money from the oil patch,’” PressProgress reports.
