Dustin Duncan has retained a personal lawyer for the first time in his nearly 18-year political career. The Saskatchewan cabinet minister in charge of Crown corporations said he’s prepared to go to prison, or what he had called “carbon jail” – the most unlikely and extreme outcome in his government’s fight against Ottawa and the current unfairness of its carbon pricing policy for home heating.
Mr. Duncan said he would still rather it didn’t come to all that. He and his boss, Premier Scott Moe, aren’t energy outlaws, as of now.
“Nobody is breaking the law yet,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview with The Globe this week.
The Saskatchewan Premier is prone to taunts like “come get me” and often appears more willing to scrap than Premier Danielle Smith next door. But Mr. Duncan sounds a bit more conciliatory.
He emphasized that the carbon-pricing proceeds to be remitted to the Canada Revenue Agency aren’t due until the end of February. He said Saskatchewan hasn’t decided definitively what it will do then – even though it stopped collecting the federal carbon tax through a rate rider on home heating bills as of Jan. 1.
And Ottawa could still change its tune. “At the end of the day the federal government can make all this go away by just extending to what they’ve done for one fuel source to everybody else.”
The chances of this happening in the weeks ahead appear slim. The Prime Minister has said there will be no more carveouts for his government’s signature climate policy; Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has emphasized that everyone must obey the law.
But it’s a mess Ottawa should have seen coming. In October, the federal government gave opponents of its climate policies the most gracious of openings when it said it would exempt home-heating oil from its carbon price plan for three years, and change the terms of a heating retrofit program. This disproportionately benefited Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals were watching traditional pockets of support sour in real time.
With this, Ottawa acknowledged there is financial pain – at least sometimes, to some economies, in some households – involved in carbon pricing. This is despite the constant Liberal refrain – aimed squarely at conservative premiers and federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre – that setting a price on pollution puts more money back into the pockets of most Canadians through rebates.
The decision also undercuts the authority of the government’s 2021 win at the Supreme Court of Canada, which said, among other things, that Ottawa needs the power to legislate a carbon price floor because a single province without a sufficiently stringent pricing policy could undermine the whole thing.
Mr. Duncan said that even though his province has long opposed any kind of carbon tax – a policy that hits its fossil fuel-heavy economy harder than others – Saskatchewan was still (most grudgingly) going along with it since the Supreme Court decision, until the pause of the tax was announced for heating oil in the fall.
No matter what, Mr. Duncan said he doesn’t want employees or board members at his province’s natural gas-distributor Crown corporation, SaskEnergy, to suffer as a result of a political battle. 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.
That’s why Mr. Duncan said he has asked the CRA to make him responsible, instead: “I have registered on behalf of the province to be the new gas distributor.” (There’s no word on whether the CRA will accept the change. The agency said in a statement it’s not allowed to discuss the details of a specific case.)
There are prodigious political calculations at play. The federal Liberals are down in the polls. Mr. Moe and his Saskatchewan Party are facing an election in October – and there’s nothing like a good fight with distant Ottawa to focus voters’ minds on what they actually like about their provincial government.
And despite Mr. Duncan’s argument that nothing is set in stone yet, it’s unlikely Saskatchewan will totally back down. More conventional entreaties regarding his government’s concerns about federal climate policies haven’t attracted the same attention.
Just three years after the Liberals’ carbon-pricing victory at the Supreme Court, the affordability crisis is hitting hard, and they’re losing hearts and minds. The fact is there are now two classes of home-heating payees in the country, based on a Liberal political calculation, and that will continue to tear away at the legitimacy of the policy. Even Canadians outside the province might look with indifference at, or even side with, roguish Saskatchewan on this one.
And it will all end up in court again, probably before Mr. Duncan or anyone else goes to carbon jail.