Juno News - May 07, 2019


Catherine McKenna spouts off about court decision she hasn't read

Topics
Catherine McKenna judicial statement
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Catherine McKenna Justin Trudeau
The carbon tax battle isn't over yet Former NDP Leader says Trudeau broke our immigration system

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

165.75

Word count

625

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Saskatoon's Court of Appeal rules that Justin Trudeau's carbon tax is constitutional, but what does that mean for the rest of the country? Andrew Lawton explains why this is not the end of the battle, but rather just the beginning.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 Yes, Justin Trudeau's carbon tax may have been found constitutional by Saskatchewan's Court of
00:00:15.480 Appeal, but as I noted in an earlier video, that does not vindicate Justin Trudeau's alarmist
00:00:21.340 and top-down approach to climate change, which is the very approach that precipitated
00:00:26.420 the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act that has now become the centre of litigation in
00:00:31.640 Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. As noted, the Saskatchewan Court decided that
00:00:38.280 in a 3-2 decision, the legislation was in fact constitutional. This is by no means the end of
00:00:43.400 the battle, but rather just the beginning. What's interesting though is how the Environment
00:00:49.160 Minister, Catherine McKenna, has decided to spin it. Now, this is a woman who is billed as a human
00:00:54.320 rights and social justice lawyer, but I have a few questions about that lawyer bit given the
00:00:59.980 statement that she put out, a very inaccurate statement in the wake of the Court of Appeal
00:01:04.740 for Saskatchewan's ruling. This is an important and welcome decision in the urgent fight against
00:01:09.560 climate change, which we know is costing Canadians and the world billions of dollars and putting
00:01:14.320 lives at risk. A majority of the court agreed that a price on carbon pollution is an essential part of
00:01:21.960 the global effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It will also ensure Canadians are better off.
00:01:28.340 She says the court decided it was in the best interest Canadians, that they'd be better off. She
00:01:32.880 says that the court decided that this was an essential policy in the government's toolkit to
00:01:38.700 deal with global warming and climate change. The fact is the court did no such thing. Quite the
00:01:44.420 contrary. Let me read from the judicial decision itself, which I would recommend Minister McKenna take a
00:01:50.160 look at, perhaps before putting out statements on this. Under Section 6, it says right there,
00:01:55.580 the sole issue before the court is whether Parliament has the constitutional authority to enact
00:02:01.140 the act. The issue is not whether greenhouse gas pricing should or should not be adopted or whether
00:02:08.080 the act is effective or fair. Those are questions to be answered by Parliament and by provincial
00:02:13.780 legislatures, not by courts. Now, one of the issues with that line is that clearly the court is saying
00:02:21.020 that provincial legislatures don't have the right to make these decisions because it's endorsed a
00:02:25.780 federal government's top-down approach. But even then, it says truthfully in there that the only
00:02:30.400 question was not whether this was good or bad policy, but whether this was something the government
00:02:35.920 had the legislative authority constitutionally to do. And I may disagree with the court's decision on that,
00:02:43.140 but I certainly wouldn't say that Catherine McKenna's position is correct because it just isn't.
00:02:48.660 This was not an endorsement of the policy. This was not an evaluation of the policy's merits. It was
00:02:53.840 simply an evaluation of the constitutional principles at stake. But what's so concerning about this is
00:03:00.400 that the federal government has been spinning this judicial victory as an endorsement of something that
00:03:06.500 the court didn't even touch, which is that Canadians have to pay the price because Justin Trudeau has
00:03:11.700 decided to link up Canada to the United Nations goals on this when other parts of the world like China and India
00:03:18.420 that are producing more in the way of emissions than Canada could ever dream of doing. And these countries are doing nothing.
00:03:25.500 But again, Canadians are supposed to pay the price. Canadians are supposed to bear the brunt of it. 0.98
00:03:30.220 But if we're going to have this discussion, let's at least have it honestly, which for Catherine McKenna
00:03:35.020 would be perhaps starting with reading the decision. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.
00:03:41.700 Thank you.
00:03:44.380 Thank you.
00:03:45.500 Thank you.