1 / Some quick thoughts on Ford voting to scrap Ontario's emissions trading scheme. Ford and the PCs are going to claim a mandate for this policy shift, and this will mute likely business protests (b/c canceling the scheme will destroy business assets but that's another story)..
2/ The key point: this mandate is illusory, and reminds us how hard solving the climate crisis is going to be. On one hand, a majority of Ontario voters supported parties that wanted to keep the carbon price. That's the first-past-the-post issue many people talk about.
3 / But there is also a deeper issue: elections don't give signals on the public's policy preferences. Three months ago, Brown was cruising to a majority promising a carbon price, then Ford cruised to one promising to cancel it. Did voters change their mind?
4 / It's possible they will change their minds moving forward. We know that publics follow elites on a bunch of policy domains, including on climate. I show this in a recent paper with @ecotone2 on shifts in US climate beliefs. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
4 / But not yet. Ontario preferences for a carbon price didn't change between Brown and Ford. In our research, we show that Ontarians in EVERY single riding support cap and trade, often by a large majority, even in ridings the PC won: environment.yale.edu/ycom/canada/20…
5 / The issue here is that the voting public can't choose menu-wise for their preferred policies - they have to buy a prix fixe meal, and often they care more about who runs restaurant than the meal itself.
6 / @smith_harvard, Teppei Yamamoto and @YusakuHoriuchi have a great paper on this subject: elections seem to give parties a mandate for major policy reforms, but these can be misleading since publics choose between party policy bundles not discrete policies.
7 / More often than not, this will be an effective way for fossil-fuel aligned special interests to roll-back climate policies
8 / As if the climate crisis were not already a hard enough political challenge. Still, Doug Ford and the PCs might find themselves surprised to find that the Ontario public is very against behind their plan.
9 / I don't doubt their repeal will succeed. But their win is not a mandate to repeal a policy that Ontario voters largely support. We need to remember that, and think about elections as a complex factor in the politics of climate change.
