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A million years ago … pardon me, my notes indicate rather surprisingly that it was the spring of 2021. Two and a half years ago, the Supreme Court found in favour of the federal government in the case of the References re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act . It was a tricky division of powers question.
To do this, they had to make a technical argument that emissions are inherently an indivisible matter of “national concern” under the Constitution. “Indivisibility” is an explicit, necessary component of that test. The whole scheme was justified by its extreme urgency and by the need for comprehensive completeness. Any local defection from binding nationwide pricing might undermine the whole thing fatally.
Last week the Liberal government whose hirelings rhapsodized about the urgent, indivisible, inherently national nature of carbon pricing announced a “temporary” total exemption for fuel oil used for home heating. This has the effect of letting some households in the Atlantic provinces out of a tax that applies to cleaner BTUs in the rest of the country, and the targeted regional nature of this move has beento push its expiry past the next federal election.
If you were a supporter of Pigouvian carbon taxation on economic grounds, or even if you just acknowledged the economic advantages, the GGPPA ruling might have seemed a cause for hope rather than a guarantee of near-future humiliation. Natural justice and economics alike are best satisfied when every ounce of some pollutant is treated equally, and a national government really is in the best position to make this principle stick.
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