Secretive carbon pricing cost fodder for intransigent premier

About every time Premier Brad Wall’s obstreperous opposition to federal carbon pricing comes across as partisan and over the top, he’s been blessed with arrogance from the federal government that seems to justify that response.

Consider the latest Wall salvos against the federal Liberal government’s carbon tax ... a Robin Hood tax, supposedly imposed on the rich polluters and then redistributed to the poor masses suffering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

The conceptual problem is that even if oil and potash mining companies are the rich, they happen to pay very good wages that play a big part in driving a still-moribund Saskatchewan economy. So do our coal-driven electrical power generation and natural gas utilities, and an added tax might be a cause of concern in Saskatchewan where 40-below winter nights require heat and light.

This is not to suggest that Wall and his Saskatchewan Party government have been anything less than unreasonable on the carbon pricing issue, which is seen by many in this country and around the world as the most viable plan to reduce GHGs.

The problem is, while Ottawa’s recent white paper did suggest agriculture would be exempt, that still leaves Ottawa’s carbon levy — $10 per tonne in 2018, increasing to $50 per tonne by 2022 — raising legitimate questions about how much it will cost.

Wall has been rigid on this point — much to the delight of his political base in this province.

Unfortunately, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna are just as intransigent, all too eager to portray Wall and Saskatchewan as dinosaurs because that happens to appeal to their Liberal urban left base.

If McKenna, Trudeau et al. are truly interested in more co-operative dialogue with Saskatchewan, one might think their white paper would have done a better job acknowledging the $1.6-billion public investment in carbon capture and storage at Boundary Dam.

Or one might think that someone in Ottawa would realize Saskatchewan is literally a very green province ... and we’re not talking about support for the Riders. Between northern forest and green, green summer crops, Saskatchewan is a 651,900-square-kilometre sinkhole for absorbing carbon.

Yes, Wall and company have seen every redacted response from Ottawa on carbon pricing as takeoff permission for some flight of fancy. Most recently, Wall went off on a tangent tying carbon pricing to equalization and other federal transfer payments ... even after McKenna’s office said this was not the case.

Yes, there’s certainly hypocrisy in that the Wall government has for years had its own carbon price levy laws for industry that it’s been unwilling to implement as he characterizes Trudeau running the federal government like a “crime family.”

But if Justin Trudeau isn’t a mob boss, he certainly is a politician like Wall all too eager to suppress potentially negative news on a centrepiece policy in the hope that no one will care or notice until after it is fully implemented.

The latest comes courtesy of a freedom of information reply to Leader-Post reporter D.C. Fraser, in which Ottawa balked at releasing exactly how much revenue could be generated from a carbon tax imposed on Saskatchewan.

While the file obtained by Fraser had a graph titled, “Calculation of revenue from a $50/ tonne carbon tax in 2022” which included how many megatonnes of emissions would be taxed — the percentage of emissions covered by the Liberal government’s proposed plans — the projected revenues were redacted.

Really, what can Saskatchewan do other than speculate, which the government is doing by suggesting it will remove $2.5 billion annually from residents, businesses and the government?

“We have looked at it from the perspective of what that may or may not cost Saskatchewan people, and our estimates are close in that region of $2.5 billion, depending on some of the specifics of how that would be implemented,” said Environment Minister Scott Moe.

Ottawa needs to be forthright with both Wall and the Saskatchewan public. It simply hasn’t been.