Saskatchewan’s carbon-tax boycott could spark crisis

Moe’s refusal to collect levy draws a line

In case there was any doubt, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and his Crown corporations minister, Dustin Duncan, have made it clearer in recent days they’re willing to play chicken with Ottawa on carbon-tax revenues. As of Jan. 1, Saskatchewanians’ electricity and natural-gas utility bills are arriving carbon-tax free.

The goal, Duncan told Reuters, is “to give (the) same carbon tax fairness for families here in Saskatchewan” that folks in Atlantic Canada now enjoy, thanks to the federal government carving out home-heating oil from the carbon tax in October last year. Saskatchewan won’t just not collect the revenue, but threatens it may not remit the money it would nevertheless legally owe to Ottawa under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act.

“We haven’t made a decision at this point,” Duncan told CBC News on Tuesday. But in the past Duncan has insisted he’s willing to go to “carbon jail” for the cause. And despite the clear wording of the law, which provides for stiff fines and even jail time for those who won’t heed it, the Saskatchewan government has predicted there will be no ramifications for ignoring the law.

Especially nowadays, when fundamental questions about the rule of law in this country are very much hot topics, the potential for escalation is fun to ponder. Even if they’re prosecuted for ignoring the carbon-tax law, what if Saskatchewan’s remittance refuseniks simply declined to pay their court-ordered fines? What if they went on the run, set up a government-in-exile in the Montana wilderness? For that matter, what if they were indeed willing to spend a few months in the slammer on principle? It would be a hell of a scene.

Most experts seem to think someone would blink before we got there, and I tend to agree. I’m just not as sure as most experts seem to be that it would be Moe and Duncan doing the blinking.

“You can’t just have provincial legislation that compels non-compliance with federal legislation,” University of Alberta law and economics professor Andrew Leach recently told The Canadian Press. And he’s right. Of course he’s right!

But I (alone, apparently) remain fascinated and perplexed by something Quebec’s National Assembly did more than a year ago: It passed a law, unanimously, amending Section 128 of the 1867 Constitution such that it no longer applies to Quebec. That has meant that MNAS can take (and have taken) their seats without swearing allegiance to the monarch, and thereby to Canada.

There is a small minority of constitutional experts, all of them from Quebec, who argue this was legally above board. But the biggest clue that Quebec could not legally pass the law that it did is that the Constitution has not been amended. It says exactly what it said beforehand. Because, duh, provinces can’t unilaterally amend the Constitution! But no one inside or outside of government has seen fit to challenge the law, so the outcome is a provincial legislature making and passing laws that some or all members are not constitutionally allowed to make or pass.

Call me a pedant, but that seems a tad alarming.

Saskatchewan isn’t Quebec, of course. The Liberals have far more to fear (and gain) from Quebec voters than from Saskatchewanian ones. But every provincial government save two has called for Ottawa to extend the Atlantic home-heatingoil exemption to Canadians who heat their homes otherwise — especially using natural gas, which after all burns considerably cleaner than home heating oil. The NDP oppositions in Alberta and Ontario are criticizing conservative governments for not doing more to help homeowners cope with their heating bills.

The Liberals are desperate — hence the Atlantic exemption — and unless some sea-change occurs in coming months, they will be even more desperate as an election draws nearer. Having compromised their carbon tax with an environmentally nonsensical political sop to Atlantic-canadian voters, it would be so easy for the Liberals simply to expand the sop nationwide and neutralize that particular inconsistency as a campaign issue. Heck, the Liberals’ carbon-tax policy would make more sense afterwards than it does now, by no longer privileging only a relatively emissions-intensive form of home heating.

(I also have a theory that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau simply enjoys humiliating Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, a former climate-change radical whose political career reads like a lost Shakespeare play titled “The Sellout.” But I can’t prove it.)

But it would be a heck of an outcome, surely — a heck of a precedent: A province simply refuses to respect the basic functioning of the federation, and Ottawa caves because it’s the easiest thing to do.

Or rather, it would be a heck of an outcome, a heck of a precedent, if Quebec hadn’t already been doing it for years. You’ll hear and read a lot in coming days about Saskatchewan risking a constitutional crisis, and that might be right. But if so, the crisis was hiding in plain sight all along. Let’s have it out.

THE CRISIS WAS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT ALL ALONG.