Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he’s happy Premier Brian Pallister is moving ahead with a Manitoba carbon tax. Of course he is. He just snookered Pallister into bringing in his own provincial tax and got him to endorse a Liberal plan most provinces are now rejecting.

The prime minister, who made a stop in Winnipeg Tuesday, is positively elated. Especially since Pallister is — as Trudeau described him — a “conservative” leader. Trudeau doesn’t have many conservative leaders, if any, supporting his carbon tax scheme. So when he finds one in the middle of the prairies, naturally he’s very excited about it.

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“We are very pleased that Manitoba is moving forward with a strong plan to put a cost on pollution and we will have conversations in the coming years as I know we will have conversations with different provinces across the country,” Trudeau said.

This is great news for the prime minister. Because he’s having a devil of a time convincing other provinces, some of whom are led by conservative premiers, to buy into his carbon tax scheme. In fact, Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland are flatly refusing to charge one.

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“But for now to see a leader, indeed a conservative leader, who understands the need to have a concrete plan that fights climate change and that takes real action that is going to be in the best interest of Manitobans right now and in businesses in the years to come is something that I very much welcome,” Trudeau said of Pallister.

Even Albertans, who will likely drop their NDP government in favour of a conservative administration next year, are expected to join the growing anti-carbon tax crowd.

Not Pallister. He has embraced Trudeau’s carbon tax principles, even if he plans to charge less in the long run than Trudeau would like. Trudeau is happy with Pallister’s carbon tax because at $25-per-tonne it’s even more than the feds have asked the provinces to charge at the moment. Ottawa wants the provinces to charge $10-per-tonne in 2018 and increase that amount by $10 a year until it hits $50 in 2022. Trudeau says he and Pallister will talk further down the road about that pricing.

In the meantime, Trudeau is ecstatic that Pallister has endorsed the basic tenets of the Liberals’ carbon pricing scheme because it gives it legitimacy. And that’s worth its weight in gold.

By getting a “conservative” premier to agree that a carbon tax is a legitimate tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a major political victory for the Liberal prime minister. The details can be worked out later. The major hurdle is getting premiers like Pallister to endorse the basic principle, as fraudulent as that principle is.

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Trudeau even said he hopes Pallister will help him sell the Liberal carbon tax scheme to other conservative leaders. It’s not a bad ask, except that Pallister’s support for a carbon tax doesn’t leave him with much currency as a conservative leader among his peers these days.

Naturally all of this makes Pallister uncomfortable. On the one hand he wants the revenue from his carbon tax but he doesn’t like having to cozy up to a Liberal government to get it. So he’s trying to show that he’s “fighting” Ottawa on its $50-per-tonne plan. He even put out a press release after Tuesday’s meeting calling on Ottawa to “respect” Manitoba’s carbon tax plan. Pallister wants the narrative to be that Manitoba is at odds with Trudeau over the tax when in fact the premier is on the same page as the federal Liberals. They both support a carbon tax, they just disagree on how high that tax should be.

Fortunately, Pallister still has an opportunity to reverse his decision. Bill 16, the proposed omnibus bill that lays the foundation for the tax, goes to public hearings in the fall. There, rank-and-file Manitobans will have a chance to come out and tell the Pallister government what they think about it. Maybe that will change the “conservative” premier’s mind.