Federal deadline could put PCs in a jam

The province should say in the next month if it wants the federal government to tax carbon emissions for it, Tuesday’s federal budget says.

That’ll be tricky, with greenhouse-gas taxes likely to be a central issue in the spring election campaign. In fact, if the federal plan were to jam up the provincial Progressive Conserva- tives, it would be hard do it any better.

The Ontario Liberals will be happy to let the federal deadline go by at the end of March. They’re all set to meet a subsequent deadline in September to explain their proposed alternative: a cap-andtrade system for cutting climate-change emissions that’s already running, linked up with equivalent programs in Quebec and California, and bringing in revenue.

The Ontario Tories’ operative election platform, Patrick Brown’s “People’s Guarantee,” promises to scrap the cap-and-trade system and use the federal tax instead — imposing a multibillion-dollar burden, but balancing it out with multibillion-dollar income-tax cuts.

Doing that would be difficult enough, what with not telling the feds that that’s Ontario’s plan until after the provincial election in June.

But now that Brown is out of the provincial Progressive Conservative leadership race, the four candidates who might replace him all propose to scrap all carbon pricing.

The best plan — because it’s the only one — for getting away with that is to take Ontario’s existing tax on gasoline, call it a carbon tax, and tell the feds that’s all the province is doing.

The Tories would have to make it one of their first orders of business upon taking power to meet the Sept. 1 deadline, and hope like crazy the federal Liberals bought it.