Not Published: My Letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star
June 4, 2008 by Paul McKeever
Early yesterday morning, I submitted the following letter to the Editor of the Toronto Star, in response to this editorial concerning the Ontario-Quebec proposal for an inter-provincial carbon cap-and-trade system. Although The Star has published my letters, and an op-ed, before, this letter did not get published in today’s paper. One possible reason is the length of the letter (it was a little longer than some of my others, though not long by the measure of other letters published daily in the Star). Can you think of any other reasons it was not published?
Read my letter, then consider this: today, the Star reports that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is now calling upon the federal government to get involved in his inter-provincial cap-and-trade proposal.
Dear Editor:
Re: Provinces lead on climate file (June 3, 2008) The Premiers of Ontario and Quebec are trumpeting an interprovincial cap-and-trade system that would eventually funnel oil revenues from oil-producing provinces to their own. They are smart enough to know that those provinces will not participate voluntarily. Arguably built to fail, their inter-provincial proposal serves a different purpose. Ontario’s premier can now quietly offer that, if the federal government agrees to lighten Ontario’s equalization burden, he will not blame the federal government for failing to force oil-producing provinces into an all-province cap-and-trade system. However, premiers who, in this manner, implicitly blame their fiscal woes on federal inaction risk inspiring a “resounding vote of non-confidence” in themselves.
Who Reads the Newspapers? (clip from “Yes, Prime Minister”)
Paul McKeever’s “The Myth of the Fiscal Gap”
Haha, Milli Vanilli. Apt song choice.