Carbon pollution, and what should be the approach by a country like ours to deal with it, is at best a contentious issue.
At worst it is massively divisive.
The issue, of course, is what impact greenhouse gases are having on our world.
The greenhouse effect is widely believed to be one of the leading causes of global warming. The most significant greenhouse gases are water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Some will, of course, argue the existence of global warming, or what is increasingly being termed climate change.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall is clearly among the doubters terming climate change “misguided dogma” in the province’s most recent Throne Speech.
Three rain events that have all been labelled as one-in-50-year, or rarer, events in Yorkton in the past decade might suggest the climate is not what it was that many years ago.
One of the widely suggested responses to the impact of greenhouse gases is to impose a tax, which admittedly seems the first response of governments to many issues.
“A carbon tax is usually defined as a tax based on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) generated from burning fuels," states the government of B.C. at www2.gov.bc.ca. "It puts a price on each tonne of GHG emitted, sending a price signal that will, over time, elicit a powerful market response across the entire economy, resulting in reduced emissions. It has the advantage of providing an incentive without favouring any one way of reducing emissions over another. By reducing fuel consumption, increasing fuel efficiency, using cleaner fuels and adopting new technology, businesses and individuals can reduce the amount they pay in carbon tax, or even offset it altogether.”
A variation on the carbon tax is the approach Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal government is taking, having announced the government would be establishing a “floor price” of $10 a tonne on carbon pollution in 2018. That price will rise to $50 a tonne by 2022.
The announcement is a first step by the federal government to support climate goals they committed to in Paris.
Premier Wall was unsurprisingly not impressed, especially as the federal environment minister was set to meet with her provincial counterparts to hash out details of a carbon pricing plan.
That is understandable in the sense setting a plan before the meeting did seem to make any meeting a hollow exercise with any positions brought forward by the provinces already discounted.
As a result, after the announcement was made, Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Scott Moe and his counterparts from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had walked out of meetings with the federal government, which does not set a good basis for federal-provincial relationships early in the federal Liberals’ term.
Certainly, the federal plan would have Saskatchewan bearing a significant cost, as Wall pointed out.
Wall also cited a provincial economy hurting from a downturn in commodity prices, which seems less reasonable since his government did not address the situation during what he himself often stated were some of the province’s best economic years in the early days of the Saskatchewan Party’s reign.
Wall has suggested the carbon tax will siphon over $2.5 billion from Saskatchewan’s economy when fully implemented and that such a situation will make the province a less competitive place to do business, although the federal plan would seem to establish the same structure nationally.
Certainly anything done in Canada has only a limited effect on a worldwide problem as much of the developing world relies on coal-fired power.
But there is also merit in a country such as Canada leading by example too.
However, the process here to-date has been adversarial from the outset, with the federal government running headlong to set an agenda, and Premiers such as Wall in denial of the need for a plan which prepares for the world’s future.
