Oh, the visionless Conservative Party of Canada thinks they’ve stumbled on a winner with their moronic, oil-splattered anti-carbon tax ads that made the front pages earlier this week even though they may or may not ever run at gas pumps, where they were supposed to appear before Canadians. They feature bright primary colours and Liberal leader Stéphane Dion with a headline about his new “tax on everything.” They’re not very subtle, but effective in their way.

And suddenly Liberal backbenchers, who are generally afraid of their own shadows, are running scared at the populist attack. “Gas prices are high!” they say. “How can we talk about raising taxes on gas?”

Never mind that a revenue-neutral carbon tax actually polls well. Never mind that an offsetting massive cut in income taxes will mean taxes haven’t actually been raised at all. Never mind that the only informed observers who oppose a carbon tax in principle are carbon producers, who oppose it because they know it will work. Never mind that it will spur innovation, will be relatively simple to administer and will actually encourage the market economy to do what it is supposed to do with minimal bureaucratic tomfoolery.

Never mind any of that! The Conservatives have scary bright yellow ads! With oil splatters on them! Run for your political lives.

If we were Liberals, we’d be trying to tell the Chicken Littles to calm down. And rather than back away from the best climate-change idea to emerge from Ottawa so far, we’d fight advertising with advertising.

If we were operatives in the Liberal Party war room, we’d be preparing a response that goes something like this:

“It’s simple: work is good. Pollution is bad. Everyone knows that, right? So Stéphane Dion and the Liberal Party of Canada are planning to give hardworking Canadians a big tax cut on their work and increase taxes on carbon pollution. Reward work, charge for pollution. It’s not complicated.

“Under Stéphane Dion’s plan, you’ll get to keep more of your hard-earned money and you’ll be in control of how much of it you want to spend on carbon products that pollute the environment.

“Under Stéphane Dion’s plan, if you carpool, or take transit, or turn your air conditioner down a few degrees, you’ll pay less in taxes and cause less pollution. Or you can keep doing what you’ve been doing and keep paying about the same taxes as you’ve always paid. We’ll give you a big tax cut, and you can decide how much of it you want to give back. You save money. We all save the planet. Simple, right?

“But Stephen Harper and his government can’t understand this simple plan. They’re so scared of giving Canadians an environmental tax cut that they got out their red and yellow crayons and created attack ads to try to scare you too. Why?

“Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper and his government prefer to take your hard-earned money in income taxes and give it to the big oil and gas companies who are earning record profits for polluting the environment. Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has said he favours an idea that won’t cut pollution but will create a big, new, expensive bureaucracy to administer a system that’s so complicated no one understands anything about it except that it will be expensive for taxpayers and a bonanza for pollution lobbyists.

“Or maybe Stephen Harper’s so scared because he doesn’t have any real plan for fighting global warming at all. And maybe Stephen Harper believes that Canadians are so stupid they can’t understand something as simple as cutting taxes on workers and raising taxes on polluters.

“Stéphane Dion’s Liberals think Canadians can see the costs of pollution and the value of work just fine. So let Stephen Harper and his Conservative government and their friends in the pollution industry get as scared as they want. While they’re working on their attack ads, Stéphane Dion will be working to save you money and save the environment. It really is that simple.” 

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