REGINA - Premier Scott Moe’s reaction was the expected one to word that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau isn’t planning to meet Premiers on the carbon tax any time soon.
“I think there’s seven Premiers now that have asked for a First Ministers meeting, I don’t know what the challenge is,” said Moe, when asked about it at a media availability Tuesday.
“Let’s sit down and talk about a real path forward that isn’t causing economic harm to Canadian families, is causing economic harm to the industries that are creating value and creating wealth in our communities across this nation, and is really in many ways creating division across this nation as well.”
Moe was one of the Premiers who had penned a letter to the Prime Minister last week in which he called on Trudeau to convene a First Ministers meeting to discuss the federal carbon tax - a call in which he joined numerous other Premiers across Canada.
In that correspondence Moe had stated “the Carbon Tax is unaffordable, unfair, and ineffective… Canadians expect us to work together, and it is time for you to come to the table.”
The requests from the Premiers for a First Ministers meeting got an apparent brush-off from Trudeau when he was interviewed by Matt Galloway on CBC last week, with Trudeau responding he met with the Premiers in 2016.
In speaking to reporters Tuesday, Moe characterized the carbon tax as “a terrible economic policy, an ineffective environmental policy that has at the very least tried to be applied fairly across the nation, and recently we’ve seen that attempt isn’t there anymore with some of the decisions around home heating fuel.”
He said there were “other paths forward,” and said that reducing emissions globally is “precisely what we are doing in Saskatchewan in the industries we are operating in,” pointing to the province's own sustainability efforts. He also questioned the effectiveness of the carbon tax by pointing to the neighbours south of the border.
“The United States of America seems to be reducing their emissions without a carbon tax,” said Moe.
Moe also reacted to the Prime Minister’s suggestion that “all the Premiers need to do is put forward their own plan and he’ll remove his. Well, it doesn’t matter who is charging, the plan has to be within his parameters of charging a carbon tax. So you change the name on where the carbon tax is submitted, it doesn’t change the damage of that policy. It doesn’t change the ineffectiveness of that policy from an environmental perspective.
“What we are saying what we’re asking for from Saskatchewan’s perspective and I know many other Premiers is let’s sit down and actually have a discussion about what will be an effective environmental policy with much less harm, economic harm to Canadians. And our concern is the economic harm that’s happening to Saskatchewan residents, whether that be directly in what they are paying at the fuel pumps when they take their children to extracurricular activity, or whether they take their children to the hockey rink, or whether it be the harm that’s happening to our investment environment here in the province. And we’re doing very well in that space and I would say it’s despite policies like the federal government’s carbon tax, not in light of those policies.”
