Timing is everything. Anticipating the long weekend fill-up, I realize that every hour of procrastination will only increase its outrageous cost. That leads me to wonder what might have happened had Michael Ignatieff stood up for his one best policy - a carbon tax - two years ago, when the idea needed a champion undaunted by the predictable backlash.
Blockheaded Liberals called the idea a "gaffe" and stumbled into the embrace of Stéphane Dion. Two years later, with record gasoline prices threatening to spike higher in the summer driving season, they are back with a carbon tax. It almost seems beside the point now. High prices change behaviour as effectively as high taxes. They are almost always the preferable instrument. Sales-tax revenues slide up with them, yielding more resources for green initiatives.
Unfortunately, excise taxes on gasoline and the municipal grants pegged to them are levied on volume, not price. The less gasoline people buy for private automobiles, therefore, the lower the value of federal grants for public transit. If those grants were pegged to sales rather than excise taxes, they would be the next thing to a perfect carbon tax.
Meanwhile, the free market is applying its own time-tested solution to the problem of overconsumption, with salutary political as well as social consequences. Hillary Clinton never stooped lower than when she promised a summer "gas-tax holiday," joining John McCain in the promise. Barack Obama never looked better than when he condemned it.
More Arts Stories
Amazingly, U.S. voters are starting to get it: A Quinnipiac University poll released this week reported that 49 per cent of voters oppose the Clinton-McCain "holiday," with 41 per cent in favour. Although another poll showed that a depressing majority of Canadians favoured their own gas-tax holiday, no respectable leader will champion the cause, leaving the job to right-wing nutbars doing gas-pump photo-ops on cable news.
Meanwhile, their left-wing doppelgangers predict that high gas prices will bring about "the end of suburbia," destroying uncountable billions of dollars in real-estate value and devastating the sprawlscape like a nuclear weapon. Neither view accounts for the capacity of people to adapt. Most Europeans pay more than $2 a litre to fill up. They pay more in gas taxes than Canadians pay for gas. Both here and there, the price of fuel accounts for about one-fifth of the total cost of owning and operating a vehicle, behind depreciation. People will cope with high gas prices by moving to smaller cars. It happened before, it's no big deal.
The big deal is what's happening to the skyline of our own city, its dramatic growth the purest expression of a post-carbon age.
Fifteen years ago, all new housing in Toronto had to have a front door. The high-rise market was dead, the 905 was booming and surface parking lots pocked the face of the central city. But things have changed - and once again prices reveal all. A beautiful house in central Mississauga with parking for four cars costs less than $200 a square foot. A slice of a midtown Toronto "filing cabinet," as Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion calls high-rise condominiums, costs well more than $400 a foot.
Why? It's the subway, stupid. It's the power of proximity, the value of choice, the enduring appeal of urbanity. As reckoned by the free market, the price of gas remains a minor factor in the total cost of the suburban lifestyle. Many ordinary people in Toronto today, especially those of the new generation, are more than happy to pay their voluntary carbon taxes - simply by moving into the suddenly fashionable, high-rise city. So let the Ottawa gang play their "revenue-neutral" shell games. The real leaders are ordinary people responding to clear market signals, calmly building a new city for the new age.
