by Simon Altman In the first blog of our series Unpacking the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), we looked at the implications of Ontario and Quebec’s decision to link with California. In today’s blog we explore an ongoing lawsuit in California that could pose an existential threat to its cap-and-trade system, and what it might mean […]
You may be surprised to learn this, but economists are not the same as “normal” people. The main difference relates to how the two groups think about markets and prices. Most people, including elected politicians, don’t think much about the workings of markets and prices. This is a serious problem when it leads to the […]
In February, Ontario released the details of its planned cap-and-trade program. The program will launch in January 2017, eventually linking with Quebec and California’s systems in 2018. In the first year of operation, it is expected to raise $1.9 billion per year, given that allocations are being provided for free to large industrial emitters, thus […]
In our recent blog on Ontario’s coming HOT lane pilot project, we congratulated Ontario on moving forward on congestion pricing policy. However, a few specific issues with the proposed Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) pilot project remain. First, using a monthly permit approach can limit the effectiveness of policy and increase costs. It can also reduce […]
Late last year, Ontario announced the details of two high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane projects as a means to improve traffic flow in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The Province will start by implementing a HOT lane—a hybrid of a tolled road and a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane—as a pilot project on a busy stretch of […]
From the downtown Toronto Y to the Sudbury Steelworkers Hall to the Kitchener Library – Ontarians are now going to be talking about carbon pricing. True, the Ontario Government’s Climate Change Discussion Paper offers a broad menu of food for thought on the direction of climate policy in the province. However, pricing carbon is an […]