In Canada, the year opened with a new act of rebellion against the carbon tax, this pollution pricing tool put in place by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018: the conservative government of Saskatchewan, a province located in the heart of the immense Canadian territory, announced on 1er January that natural gas and electricity consumers were now exempt from paying the federal carbon fee. The province’s minister responsible for energy utilities, Dustin Duncan, said the move would result in savings for “98% families who use natural gas to heat their homes, to the tune of around $400 [274 euros] each, in 2024.”
This coup by a province against federal legislation, which should be legally challenged by Ottawa, comes after the Canadian Prime Minister himself opened a breach in his own pollution taxation system.
Refusal of tax
On October 26, 2023, Justin Trudeau announced the suspension of the carbon tax on fuel oil for three years. The measure was presented as a way to reduce Canadians’ energy bills, increased by inflation; in reality, it was mainly intended to calm the discontent of consumers in the maritime provinces of the east of the country, still largely dependent on expensive heating oil.
It did not take much for all the opponents of this ecological taxation to give voice: the governments of the gas and oil provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as that of powerful Ontario, always opponents of carbon tax, denounced the “territorial bias” of the measurement. They demanded that this exclusion from the carbon price be extended to natural gas, less polluting than fuel oil and a source of heating for 44% of Canadians. It was Ottawa’s categorical “no” that led Saskatchewan to refuse to collect the tax.
The first opponent of Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, who is campaigning for the pure and simple abolition of this carbon tax under the slogan “Axe the tax” (“Chop the tax”), has for its part multiplied the blows in the House of Commons to try to carve up, piece by piece, the federal legislation: a bill aimed at exempting farmers using gas from this tax natural or propane for their grain dryers could soon be approved by the Canadian Parliament and further undermine the coherence and effectiveness of the system.
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