Juno News - April 16, 2019


Andrew Lawton re-caps day one of Ontario’s carbon tax hearing

Topics
carbon tax constitutional reference
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau
Andrew Lawton at the Carbon Tax Trial Andrew Lawton re-caps day two of Ontario’s carbon tax hearing

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

173.41

Word count

507

Sentence count

17


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Andrew Lutton reviews the first day of the federal government's constitutional challenge to the Ontario government's carbon tax, and the province's defence of its position on the matter. He also discusses the key constitutional question of whether or not the carbon tax can be described as a tax.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We just concluded the first day of the much-awaited carbon tax constitutional
00:00:14.400 reference taking place at Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto. The Ontario
00:00:18.240 government taking Justin Trudeau's carbon tax to court questioning the
00:00:22.160 constitutionality of it and what was interesting is I first said heading into
00:00:26.520 this hearing that one of the key questions was going to be only about the
00:00:30.520 constitutionality not about the policy implications but what was very
00:00:34.280 interesting today as the Ontario government laid out its position and its
00:00:38.320 opening arguments for the entirety of the day was that the province spent about
00:00:42.240 half of its time actually speaking to some of the policy implications. For
00:00:46.200 example the Ontario government laid out its claim that the federal carbon tax
00:00:50.440 model doesn't take into consideration that Ontario is taking independent of the
00:00:55.040 federal government action to curb climate change. Another example is that
00:00:59.040 the government laid out the position that the federal carbon tax essentially
00:01:03.480 allows the federal government to nationalize any area imaginable if there's
00:01:08.680 an argument to be made that it causes greenhouse gas emissions. For example if
00:01:13.080 the federal government has a mandate to regulate greenhouse gas emissions it can
00:01:17.000 also regulate everything under provincial jurisdiction contributing to
00:01:21.440 greenhouse gas emissions like perhaps whether automobiles could be banned or
00:01:25.120 perhaps whether you should be able to ban wood stoves in homes. Now it was
00:01:28.760 certainly a slippery slope argument but it spoke to the fundamental reality of
00:01:33.400 what happens if the federal government's argument is accepted. Basically the
00:01:37.860 Ontario government was saying in its arguments today that the federal
00:01:41.780 government cannot be allowed to essentially have carte blanche on something so
00:01:46.820 critical because it is not at this time one of the enumerated powers that the
00:01:51.660 federal government wields. So that was how we started to see a little bit of a
00:01:55.340 preview at what's going to be coming up in the week ahead. Now one key element here
00:02:00.580 that I found was very interesting is the question of whether the carbon tax can
00:02:04.740 adequately be described as a tax. You know this isn't just a political
00:02:09.020 question of whether it's a price on carbon or a tax but actually a key
00:02:12.500 constitutional question. You see the greenhouse gas act that allows for this
00:02:17.220 carbon pricing doesn't specifically call it a tax. Now this was argued by the
00:02:21.860 provincial government to be very critical because it means the parliament has not
00:02:25.780 been authorized to levy a tax on this. So the provincial government's position is
00:02:30.980 that this is an unconstitutional tax and it doesn't meet the standard of being a
00:02:35.140 regulatory charge. Now this is one of these little in the weeds discussions that
00:02:39.140 probably makes you very grateful that I'm here and you're not but it is
00:02:42.460 an important distinction. Is the federal government collecting revenue that it
00:02:46.060 is not constitutionally authorized to? Tomorrow we're going to be hearing from
00:02:49.900 the federal government on its position and we'll have a full update then. For
00:02:53.420 True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.