Clark wins carbon tax compromise
Levy would stop at B.C.’s existing $30-per-tonne level in 2020, then be re-evaluated
Premier Christy Clark found compromise after initially balking at the terms of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change.
Premiers met with Trudeau Friday to negotiate the terms of his plan to craft a national framework on climate. The agreement is intended to ensure Canada meets, or exceeds, the 2030 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels, as promised at the U.N.-sponsored climate change summit last year.
The core measure is imposition of a national price on carbon, starting at $10 per tonne of carbon emissions in 2018, rising to $50 per tonne by 2022. Ottawa will impose that price in provinces that refuse to adopt their own carbon pricing regimes.
But late in the meeting, Clark walked out and told reporters she wouldn’t be signing. Both Clark and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall disagreed with Trudeau’s plan to set a national price on carbon and impose it on provinces that do not implement their own carbon pricing plan.
Wall is ideologically opposed to the idea of a carbon tax. B.C. already has a carbon tax, but Clark wanted — and got — assurances that Ontario and Quebec’s cap-and-trade carbon market would impose an equivalent carbon price.
Under the compromise deal, the carbon price would pause at B.C.’s existing $30 level in 2020, when an independent expert panel will evaluate the effectiveness and comparability of different carbon pricing mechanisms, with an interim report due in 2020 and a final evaluation in early 2022.
Wall and Manitoba Premier Brad Palmister refused to to sign on.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May wrote in a tweet she supports the deal, calling it a “step in right direction.”
But May also said the “reality” is it will not help achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals of keeping a global temperature rise this century below 2 C.