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This paper explores how politicians respond to the public salience of policy issues when determining which topics to publicly address. Using new data and state-of-the-art methodology, our study provides a fresh perspective on this fundamental question. We focus on a multi-party parliamentary system, specifically the Canadian House of Commons, with a specific emphasis on the issue of climate change. To assess the attention given by political parties to various policy issues, we analyze transcripts from the Question Period spanning from April 2006 to June 2021. To gauge the public's level of concern for these issues, we incorporate data obtained from Google Trends. Employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy, our study causally estimates the extent to which the public salience of climate change influences elite attention. Our findings reveal that the public salience of climate change significantly influences the attention given to this issue by parties, albeit with noticeable partisan variations. Moreover, our research highlights the effectiveness of the Question Period in compelling the government to address challenging or potentially embarrassing issues. Lastly, we uncover evidence suggesting that the Liberal Party of Canada successfully increased the public salience of climate change during its tenure in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of sub-global participation in greenhouse gas mitigation efforts, this paper investigates the effectiveness of a Canada-U.S. emissions bubble under their existing regional trade agreement. It also explores the potential economic impact of carbon tariff harmonization through the implementation of a common Canada-U.S. external border tariff adjustment as a mean to address competitiveness issues. Using a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model the paper finds that the creation of an emission bubble between the two countries could improve efficiency. The findings also suggest that a carbon tariff harmonization policy could give rise to distributional issues among Annex I regions and could fail to mitigate the negative competitiveness impacts of carbon abatement policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]