Wall’s politicking, contempt for Trudeau becoming problematic

If Brad Wall’s federal carbon tax concerns are to be taken seriously, it would be better if the Saskatchewan premier treated Justin Trudeau like every other prime minister he has dealt with.

The problem, however, is the only other prime minister Brad Wall has dealt with is Stephen Harper. And while hiding his Western-conservative contempt for Trudeau Liberals seems an impossibility, it’s Wall’s eagerness to score political points at Trudeau’s expense that may be the big problem right now.

But before we go into Wall’s latest half-baked conspiracy theory — that Trudeau has threatened to tie carbon pricing to equalization payments that we don’t get and Wall insists he doesn’t want — let us acknowledge there is a federal-provincial issue in play here. Wall is likely right: Trudeau’s $22-per-tonne carbon pricing would be a massive disruption to an already staggering Saskatchewan economy, hitting agriculture, mining and oil especially hard.

Even if one accepts the federal government argument that the provinces can make carbon pricing revenue-neutral, it remains questionable whether it can actually help a province like Saskatchewan reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In that sense, Trudeau’s carbon tax is quickly becoming the new version of former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien’s long-gun registry — an idea that sounds good in theory, but is likely to do more unintended harm than good.

That said, such provincial/federal squabbles in this country are as old as Confederation. What’s needed is enough mutual respect so disagreements can be resolved in some reasonable manner.

However, that requires trust ... or, better put, setting aside one’s partisan differences. Unfortunately, Wall seems to have little interest in doing that. Wall’s latest political distraction — affectionately now known around the legislature as his pre-question-period scrum — involves a “heavily redacted” memo from “an online source” (sounds pretty, conspiratorial, doesn’t it) the premier says ties a province’s stance on carbon pricing to equalization payments.

Alas, there are a couple of problems with Wall’s thesis. The first is, the memo says nothing of the sort ... unless one allows one’s fertile imagination to fill in the heavily redacted parts. The second is that Saskatchewan doesn’t get equalization payments ... and doesn’t want charity doled out to “have-not” provinces.

Or so we learned back in 2009 when Wall flip-flopped, announcing his government had no intention of pursuing legal action over an $800-million-a-year benefit we would have received from the Harper government if it kept is 2006 election promise to remove non-renewable resources from the equalization formula. Wall had teamed up with the Conservatives to lobby Paul Martin’s Liberal government to exclude non-renewable resource revenue. You begin to see Wall’s pattern with Liberal governments.

Immediately, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna dashed off a statement Monday, assuring Wall carbon pricing would not be tied to equalization. Undeterred, Wall dashed off his own letter to Trudeau demanding assurances “there will be no linkage between provincial carbon tax policies and federal transfer payments or any other type of federal payments to provinces, such as infrastructure funding.”

“That’s no way to run a federation,” Wall told reporters Monday. “That’s less like how you run a federation and more like how you run a crime family.”

Crime family? Can you imagine Wall inferring Stephen Harper was a mob boss because he went back on his word on equalization? No? Neither can I.

Wall went on in the scrum to question the integrity of federal Liberal ministers, who he says are privately hinting federal money might be available if Saskatchewan went on with carbon pricing. Sounds politically sleazy, doesn’t it? And, yes, one can very much imagine Liberal ministers doing this. That’s because it’s pretty much what former federal Conservative ministers also did do to get provinces like Saskatchewan to go along with publicprivate partnerships (P3s) for things like Regina’s sewage treatment facility.

But that was from the Harper government. For Brad Wall, that, evidently, makes all the difference in the world.