Andrew Coyne, quite likely in response to Jeffrey Simpson's annual mea culpa in the Globe and Mail, used to write a witty year-ender in which he would highlight all the things he got right.

I checked at macleans.ca and didn't see such an effort for this past year yet, but he'll have a tough time explaining away this May 14 headline:

Why the public might buy into a carbon tax

Oopsie. :)

Simpson also touched on the carbon tax issue in his annual mea culpa column today:

... after all these years, you would think an observer would have better understood how tax-averse Canadians are and how easily ideas in the public domain can be twisted. You would also have thought that an observer would have known better than to have equated his own enthusiasm with that of the public – a mistake politicians and interest groups always make.

Hence, enthusiasm for a carbon tax (now taken up with equal futility by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman) led me to read the B.C. budget that proposed one and write: “The great taboo of a carbon tax has vanished.” This kind of tax, I asserted, would in due course be “imitated by all governments serious about climate change.” That budget would be to climate-change policy what Saskatchewan's medicare budget had been to public health care, I wrote in a laughable overstatement.

Wrong. The idea of a national carbon tax was rejected. We can speculate and analyze and dissect why. The people said No. A carbon tax, thus rejected, will become the third rail of Canadian politics: Touch it and die.

When former Liberal leader Stephane Dion unveiled The Green Shift, I will always remember the first words out of Peter Mansbridge's mouth on the first At Issue panel (on CBC TV's The National) were: "I don't want to talk about the policy. I want to talk about the politics."

At a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in November on polling, I repeated that anecdote and asked the following rhetorical question: If all people are getting is a discussion about the politics of something as complex as The Green Shift and not any information about the actual policy, then how exactly are people making up their minds on how they should vote on it?

My point in the context of the session was that polling could be used to identify knowledge gaps in the electorate, which the media could try to fill, rather than to just provide a horse-race headline. No one on the panel would say if the media is using polling in this way.

As for me, I would have to wipe some egg off my face about the carbon tax/green shift.

As I ruefully told some folks after the Oct. 14 vote, "I said in the summer it could be a game-changer. I was right!"