Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.
Reference cases to the Supreme Court of Canada likely wouldn’t be on many people’s wish list for the coming year, but Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne has suggested one that might spare many Canadians from the blatant politicking of governments facing elections.
As of the New Year, Saskatchewan’s Crown natural gas and electric utilities have removed the federal carbon price from home heating bills. The province says doing so will improve fairness for residents in relation to other provinces.
It was a move made by Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe after the federal government announced in the fall that home heating oil, which is most widely used in the Atlantic provinces, would not be subject to federal carbon pricing for more than three years. Saskatchewan asked for the exemption to cover all other forms of heating, but Ottawa denied the request.
Declining to remit the carbon tax, which is due at the end of February, is against the law, which Mr. Moe acknowledges. He calls it “unfortunate.” His Energy Minister, Dustin Duncan, says he’s prepared to go to “carbon jail” over it and the province has moved to protect employees and board members at Saskatchewan’s natural gas-distributor Crown corporation, SaskEnergy, Globe columnist Kelly Cryderman writes today after speaking with the minister.
Saskatchewan has passed legislation to indemnify them from fines. But the province can’t shield anybody from the potential of imprisonment, as is listed as a punishment under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, however unlikely that event (and it is highly unlikely).
Mr. Moe is facing an election this year, slated for October. Mr. Trudeau and his government must head to the polls by October, 2025.
Kelly writes in an earlier column that the Liberals’ move to exempt home heating oil from the tax for three years “skewed heavily in favour of households struggling with costs in Atlantic Canada – pointedly also where the Liberals were watching their once-strong approval numbers run into the ditch.”
She noted there is no such relief for farmers, a group the Liberals have little chance of wooing. And a vote last month in the Senate left in limbo a private member’s push to remove the carbon levy from natural gas and propane used by farmers for heating or cooling their barns, or running their grain dryers.
But Andrew Coyne writes that it’s the federal government that has constitutional authority to decide to whom or what the federal carbon levy should apply. And Saskatchewan’s efforts to protect officials who have been directed to break the law isn’t a demonstration of the way the law works, he argues.
“We have reached, in short, a dangerous new turn in the current epidemic of provincial lawlessness – not only in Saskatchewan and Alberta, but in Quebec (Bills 21 and 96, both backed by the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause) and Ontario (whose own repeated recourse to the clause, on the flimsiest of pretexts, has set new standards for uncouth expedience).”
The federal government could enact penalties: Provinces depend on federal co-operation and cash for all sorts of things.
But a Supreme Court reference on the constitutionality of the federal government’s legislation “might be clarifying and would buy time,” Andrew points out.
“Sooner or later the other provincial revolutionaries will have to be confronted, as well. Not only is the constitutional order of the country under challenge. The very rule of law is at stake.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.