In the words of Chris Ragan, Chair of the Ecofiscal Commission, and Director of the Max Bell School of Public Policy, Ecofiscal is "a kind of a think tank, but it’s different than a normal think tank." Indeed, Ecofiscal is uniquely specialized in one big idea: carbon pricing. As part of the Max Bell School's conference Better Policy for a Better World, Ivey Foundation Vice President Andrea Moffat moderated a panel of three independent experts, fostering a conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission as it nears the end of its five year mandate.
David McLaughlin, a climate and sustainability public policy expert, lauded the Commission for its willingness to work directly with provincial governments. While McLaughlin was working with the Manitoba government, advising them on the development of their climate plans, “[They] made certain that folks left with a good understanding of what carbon pricing is and what it isn’t. And it helped further our understanding...of what carbon pricing could do in the Manitoba context and what it couldn’t.”
The production value of the Commission’s reports and blogs is what impressed Bill Watson, an economist and columnist at the Financial Post. “The documents I would get from Ecofiscal were just terrific: lots of colour, beautiful layouts.” But with the style came excellent substance, too. “I always saw it as reporting on state-of-the-art research...I always admired it.”
According to Andrew Leach, an associate professor at the Alberta School of Business, Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission accomplished something exceedingly difficult. “[Chris Ragan] managed to bring together academics with quite diverse viewpoints on a lot of issues and figure out where their points of agreement were.” As Bill Watson later noted, “It’s a rare thing, when you get all these economists to agree. And I guess the agreement was over the fact that [carbon isn’t] priced, and it really should be priced.”
The panelists also offered a number of critiques on the Commission, ranging from the stylistic to the structural.
Bill Watson took issue with the name. “You’re a commission. Who commissioned you? You’re self-commissioned! And in my newspaper, that fact led every paragraph that was ever written about the Ecofiscal Commission.”
At the core of the Commission’s argument for carbon pricing is the fact that putting a price on pollution is the most cost effective way to lower emissions. Regrettably, according to Andew Leach, “The way that’s been translated by basically everybody is that in every dimension a carbon price is the best policy...that’s caused us to lose sight of the first order problem, which is you’re trying to internalize the externalities [of carbon emissions].”
On a similar note, David McLaughlin criticized the Commission’s “fixation on the instrument...over the outcome,” highlighting the “inadequacy of the ‘one big idea’ approach in an advocacy tank or organization such as [Ecofiscal].” "When an institution is created with a singular goal of propagating a certain policy mechanism, it runs the risk of losing focus on its ultimate goal - in this case, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In certain cases, a carbon tax is not the best instrument for reducing emissions - an economy-wide carbon price in Manitoba covered about 50 percent of the economy, versus 80 percent probably in Alberta.”
On the whole, the panel declared the Commission to be a success. “I think we’ll give Ecofiscal an “A” grade on all of the effort over the past number of years,” remarked Moffat, as the conference session drew to a close, “And hopefully we give the panel the same!”
