I am deeply disappointed by…

I am deeply disappointed by this government's efforts to undo climate change mitigation progress in Ontario. In particular, I am concerned about the effort to repeal carbon pricing and eliminate all provincial climate targets without having a proposal to replace them. This is a pretty substantive governance failure, which will be to the long-term detriment of Ontarians and the world more broadly.
In light of the recent Special Report 15 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are seeing an increasing push from the global scientific community for more urgent action to mitigate climate change. The report hinges on the already experienced extreme weather, drought, flooding, and other impacts of the historical 1 degree Celsius of global temperature rise, and an assessment of further impacts at 1.5 degrees. These pose critical risks that will impact hundreds of millions globally, increasing geopolitical and economic instability.
While I disagreed with many aspects of the Climate Change Mitigation and Low Carbon Economy Act, it was at least premised on actively engaging with the scope of the problem. It is incredibly backward that at a time when action is needed, the efforts of the Government of Ontario are to undo legislation. There are two major concerns with this:
1) The government is inherently erasing its emission reduction targets. This creates policy uncertainty for no reason - the 80% emission reduction by 2050 is aligned with the scope of change needed globally to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. Moving that target anywhere but upward is both arbitrary and insufficient. Bill 4 section 3, 4, and 5 are excessively vague and provide no timelines for when a new set of targets and plans will be produced, nor any guarantee that they will meet or exceed those which were being replaced.
2) The government is abandoning a market-based mechanism, presumably to implement a regulatory framework if any framework at all is created within the next climate action plan. This flies in the face of any conservative approach to tackling climate change. A price on carbon, either through a cap-and-trade, tax, or tax-and-dividend program is the most economically efficient way to reduce emissions. Period. It allows the market to determine where reductions can be made at lowest cost, and creates incentives for parties to do so - whether they are homeowners, businesses, or communities. Regulatory inflexibility will inherently be more expensive. While there is certainly room for improving the current cap-and-trade program (such as providing rebates to low-middle income households to offset the regressive nature of a consumption-based tax), those are modifications that can be made, rather than outright repeal. The Nobel Prize for Economics was just given to someone researching and advocating for a global carbon tax for exactly this reason.
Bill 4 represents a major reversal of climate policy in Ontario, and should be called out as such. While I am willing to be convinced of an alternate approach that achieves equal or greater emissions reductions at lower cost, that approach is currently completely absent and this represents a major failure.