Juno News - May 06, 2019


The carbon tax battle isn't over yet


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

176.31662

Word count

741

Sentence count

25


Summary

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

Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan rules that the federal government's carbon tax is constitutional. Andrew Lutton explains why this is a win for the Trudeau government and what to look out for in the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of provinces challenging the carbon tax.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 The Saskatchewan government has lost its constitutional appeal of Justin Trudeau's
00:00:14.280 carbon tax. The Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan ruled in a 3-2 decision that no part nor the
00:00:21.100 totality of the federal carbon tax law, the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, is in
00:00:27.440 violation of the Constitution. Now what was interesting about this decision is that two
00:00:32.880 judges found that the entirety of the act is in fact in violation of the Constitution and despite
00:00:39.660 the element of this that only one vote was ultimately the swing between this legislation
00:00:45.100 being found unconstitutional versus it being found constitutional, the federal government has been
00:00:50.860 absolutely jubilant saying that this somehow vindicates its position that it has not only a
00:00:56.240 right but some half-baked moral obligation to impose a job-killing carbon tax on Canadians.
00:01:02.580 Take a look at the statement that Environment Minister Catherine McKenna put out. She heralded
00:01:07.460 this as some sort of victory against climate change denial and a victory against the Conservatives and
00:01:12.360 gave this ultimatum to Conservative Premiers. Look I obviously wanted the Court to rule the
00:01:18.060 opposite way. I wanted it to find that in fact the Saskatchewan government's approach was the correct
00:01:22.960 one but as I noted when I covered at Osgoode Hall the Ontario government's challenge of the Greenhouse
00:01:29.140 Gas Pollution Pricing Act that this is going to be a long road before we get a final answer.
00:01:33.980 There still is no decision on Ontario's court reference case. The new Alberta government under
00:01:39.640 Premier Jason Kenney has vowed to fight this in court as well. We know that New Brunswick is waiting
00:01:44.500 to see what happens with the other provinces before pushing for anything on its own and ultimately
00:01:50.000 because there will be at least three different provinces constitutional questions assessed by
00:01:56.000 provincial courts the Supreme Court of Canada will ultimately get the final say on this and that's
00:02:01.180 going to be the one people should be waiting for before claiming any sort of ultimate victory here
00:02:05.840 as Catherine McKenna has done. Now the key in this decision as I've read through it is well first off
00:02:12.300 the court has dismissed the alarmist rhetoric we were hearing from the David Suzuki Foundation and
00:02:17.960 from the Intergenerational Climate Coalition. The court basically found that there's no argument
00:02:23.140 that this is a national emergency and that that should authorize the federal government to behave in
00:02:28.200 this way. What the court did find is that this is a regulatory charge not a tax. That means that the
00:02:34.520 court agreed with what the federal government said that revenue collection was not the primary purpose of
00:02:39.880 this. But there was a line in this that stood out to me as a little bit odd. The court said that the
00:02:45.580 reason it thinks this is not a revenue gathering tool is because provinces have the option to gather
00:02:52.040 the revenue themselves which means the federal government wouldn't have to gather it. Well if you're
00:02:57.060 a taxpayer I don't think you care about which hand is reaching in your pocket as much as you care
00:03:01.300 about the fact that a hand has to be reaching into your pocket. So that's going to be an interesting
00:03:06.280 dynamic as we look at the case moving forward in Ontario and ultimately the case in Alberta.
00:03:12.760 Another aspect is that they found greenhouse gas emissions are narrow enough in focus that the
00:03:17.860 government could designate them an issue of national concern. And where Canadians need to be very on guard
00:03:23.680 about this is where the Ontario and Saskatchewan governments put forward their primary concerns.
00:03:29.400 That if the federal government can regulate greenhouse gas emissions because of climate change
00:03:33.980 then that means they'll be able to regulate everything that causes greenhouse gas emissions
00:03:39.120 from your wood stove to the car that you drive to your home heating temperature. The court said this
00:03:44.780 was a little bit of an exaggeration that this wasn't something that would happen because the federal
00:03:49.960 government will have to limit the scope of future legislation. But the whole point here is that
00:03:55.220 the federal government has now been given the green light at least for the time being to put forward
00:04:00.640 broad sweeping laws even if they may trample on provincial jurisdiction. So while it is the loss of a battle
00:04:06.680 it's not the loss of the war and we'll continue fighting on this for taxpayers. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.