FEDS ON TRACK TO IMPLEMENT CARBON TAX IN NEW YEAR.
Feds on track to impose carbon price on growing number of provinces on Jan. 1
Federal officials say there’ll be no problem adding Manitoba to the growing list of provinces where Ottawa will have to apply a carbon tax - but they’re still not ready to say exactly how the revenues raised by the tax will be given back to people in those provinces.
“We’re still completely on track to implement in regions where it is required by Jan. 1,” said an official in Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s office. Manitoba did a sudden aboutface Wednesday on its plan to start charging a $25 per tonne carbon tax this fall. Premier Brian Pallister said he was backing off because he could not get Ottawa to promise it wouldn’t force Manitoba to raise that price to $30 in 2020, $40 in 2021 and then to $50 in 2022. McKenna said she’s “perplexed” by Pallister’s move, since Ottawa is still in the middle of reviewing Manitoba’s plan to determine whether it meets the federal standard.
Under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, provinces that don’t have at least a $20-pertonne price on carbon emissions by Jan. 1 will have such a price applied by Ottawa. All revenues from it are to be returned to people of the province where the money is collected but the details about how that rebate system will work have yet to be announced. To avoid having the federal price imposed on them, all provinces had to submit their carbon pricing plans by Sept. 1 and McKenna told The Canadian Press recently that reviews of all those plans were ongoing. Speaking a few days before Manitoba’s pullback, she said only Saskatchewan and Ontario were clearly lacking. Saskatchewan’s government has rejected a carbon price from Day 1 and is planning to sue Ottawa over it. Ontario’s new Conservative government under Doug Ford cancelled that province’s cap and trade system almost before the ink on its swearing-in papers was dry.
Manitoba is now on that list, and it seems likely both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island will be found lacking because their plans are to largely use existing programs rather than introduce new taxes. Newfoundland hasn’t made public its plan.
Nova Scotia has a cap-andtrade regime on its big industrial emitters and it’s not clear yet if that will meet Ottawa’s requirement for a broad-based carbon price.