Trudeau, Wall petulance on carbon tax needs to stop

If you think both Premier Brad Wall and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are behaving like petulant children on the carbon pricing/tax issue, you are likely right.

In his latest salvo against Trudeau and the carbon tax,

Wall rails against Ottawa’s most recent arbitrary declaration that its new $2-billion Low Carbon Economy Fund should only be available to provinces and territories that have adopted the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change.

In other words, everyone except Conservative-governed and agriculture-based Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“We will be supporting provinces and territories that have signed up for the plan,” Catherine McKenna, federal minister of environment and climate change, said last Thursday.

For good reason, the Saskatchewan Party government was rather ticked off at the federal government’s move.

You may also recall last week the results from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made the Leader-Post’s David Fraser, in which Ottawa redacted any and all critical information on the actual yearly total cost to Saskatchewan of its so-called carbon pricing once the full $50-a-tonne penalty is implemented in 2022.

Saskatchewan Environment Minister Scott Moe has speculated it will be about $2.5 billion a year. Notwithstanding that Moe’s priority should be environment rather than economic development, no one in the province can ignore the potential chill such a tax would place on oil, gas and mining development here. And even with the Liberal government’s recent white paper commitment that carbon pricing wouldn’t apply to agriculture, it’s difficult to believe farming won’t be impacted.

Saskatchewan is being punished ... which seems counterproductive to what the federal Liberals are trying to accomplish.

“The important conversation that we need to be having here is ‘What are we doing to reduce our emissions?’ ” Moe said last week, noting that zero-till agriculture on pastures, easements on grasslands, and the 4R approach that promotes sustainable farming seem to be roundly ignored by Ottawa, whose focus seems strictly on carbon output.

The Saskatchewan environment minister also pointed to the $1.5-billion public investment in the Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage facility and the province’s commitment to

50 per cent renewables.

Moe said Saskatchewan will apply for the fund anyway. One strongly suspects it will be a successful application, because what we are seeing from Ottawa is political game-playing.

While Manitoba and Saskatchewan have been told they will only get their share if they sign on, McKenna’s proclamation last week also stated Manitoba’s and Saskatchewan’s shares ($66 million and $62 million respectively) “will be transferred to the challenge fund. These provinces can apply for funding under the challenge fund, regardless of whether they join the framework.” Sigh.

But one can only be suspicious that Trudeau’s own political petulance is a direct response to what has been nothing but petulance from Wall. And the problem right now is Wall can’t seem to help himself.

Whether it’s a calculated move to detract from his economic/ political problems at home, a way to recapture the political adoration he craves or sincere, stubborn determination in a fight for an issue he believes in, Wall’s responses to Trudeau have been decidedly partisan ... and very unhelpful.

Of late, he has taken to Twitter with equalization charts and a graph complaining: “No green $ from Trudeau for SK/MB until we sign carbon tax. But QC gets OVER $11B per yr based on the constitution, which QC never signed” and “Trudeau promised new era of coop federalism. It is new, all right. More punitive, petty & heavy-handed than anything Stephen Harper ever did.”

Really? Equalization charts? From the premier who let Stephen Harper off the hook for his Conservative government’s $800-million 2006 election promise to remove natural resources from the equalization formula? “More punitive, petty & heavy-handed than anything Stephen Harper ever did”? Robbing Saskatchewan of what would have been $8 billion in additional federal transfers isn’t as bad or worse? It would help if both Trudeau and Wall grew up a bit.