Ontario & Saskatchewan take on Ottawa over a carbon tax

Photo: joelbeeb [CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The premiers of Ontario and Saskatchewan have teamed up to take on the federal government over Ottawa’s carbon tax.

At a meeting of the Council of the Federation in New Brunswick, Doug Ford (Ontario) and Scott Moe (Saskatchewan) say they will take the Trudeau government to court to challenge its authority to arbitrarily impose a carbon tax.

"We agreed today to join forces and use every single tool at our disposal to challenge the federal government's authority to arbitrarily impose a carbon tax on the people of Ontario and Saskatchewan,” said the premiers in a joint statement.

“Carbon taxes make life unaffordable for families, and put thousands of jobs at risk. This type of taxation does nothing for the environment and hits people in the wallet in order to fund big government initiatives.”

This provoked immediate reaction from environmental groups who believe some form of carbon tax is necessary to curb climate change.

“It is deeply irresponsible of the Saskatchewan and Ontario governments to reject carbon pricing,” said Isabelle Turcotte, interim federal policy director at the Pembina Institute, in a press release.

She cited California as a carbon pricing success story. With its cap-and-trade carbon pricing system in place, that state has been able to reach its 2020 carbon pollution reduction goal ahead of time.

Ontario, under the previous Liberal government, was part of the cap-and-trade system along with California and Quebec, but newly-elected Conservative premier, Doug Ford has scrapped that.

Whether you believe climate change is real or not, it clearly has a lot of people hot under the collar.