Juno News - April 19, 2019


Recapping the final day of Ontario’s carbon tax hearing


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

168.125

Word count

538

Sentence count

22


Summary

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

The Supreme Court of Canada has delivered its decision on the federal government's application to challenge Ontario's carbon tax on carbon emissions in a landmark Supreme Court case. The federal government argues that it has the authority to act on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. Ontario argues that the government does not have the authority under the Constitution to do so.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 At long last, the four-day carbon tax court reference at Osgoode Hall in downtown Toronto has come to an end.
00:00:17.000 No decision has been rendered, of course, a lot of information for the five justices on Ontario's Court of Appeal to go through.
00:00:23.000 But ultimately, Ontarians, and indeed all Canadians, really have been able to see what the key arguments are here.
00:00:29.000 The federal government has put forward the position that it doesn't just have the jurisdiction but ultimately the obligation to act on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to curb climate change.
00:00:39.000 The provincial government saying we don't disagree about the need to advance an aggressive policy perhaps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reduce climate change.
00:00:49.000 However, it is the responsibility of the provinces and not the federal government to make that distinction.
00:00:55.000 There were a lot of arguments put forward by both sides that really go down to some very key Supreme Court cases that talk about the enumeration of powers.
00:01:04.000 And I'm not going to go through all of these but I will say that it was interesting that a new dimension was added to the discussion on the fourth and final day of the hearing.
00:01:12.000 And that was whether this can adequately be characterized as legislation acceptable under the emergency powers that the Constitution authorizes the federal government to do, irrespective of provincial powers.
00:01:24.000 And I mentioned this briefly earlier in the week, the federal government did not make emergency powers a key part of its submission.
00:01:31.000 It was actually the David Suzuki Foundation and the Intergenerational Climate Coalition that did prompting almost a footnote from the federal government of, well, if the court agrees with that, then yes, we'll pursue that.
00:01:42.000 And what I found so interesting was that despite how minimal the role of that discussion was earlier in the week, it actually occupied a pretty significant chunk of Ontario's closing arguments or replies today.
00:01:55.000 So the question becomes, is that a potential source of frustration or hesitation from Ontario that maybe that was a compelling argument put forward by the interveners?
00:02:06.000 We don't know and won't know, but it was an observation that it seemed to get more airtime from the Ontario government than from the Canadian government.
00:02:15.000 Among the other key questions are whether this would open the floodgates to federal government overreach into provincial territories.
00:02:23.000 The federal government says no, it can be very limiting in its own legislation moving forward.
00:02:28.000 The provincial government, not just in Ontario, but also in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, says this could in fact cause monumental challenges for other provinces moving forward if they do not have the right to keep these areas in their jurisdiction.
00:02:42.000 Among the many arguments that were brought up, we'll obviously follow this as it advances.
00:02:46.000 And I note that the Manitoba government earlier this month said it would be launching its own legal challenge with the election of Jason Kenney and the UCP in Alberta.
00:02:55.000 They may be launching their own challenge as well.
00:02:57.000 So we are heading towards inevitably a Supreme Court case at some point.
00:03:02.000 We're not there yet, but we'll of course follow this as things progress.
00:03:05.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.