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Both, moreover, would almost certainly be of no force or effect, being either unconstitutional or impossible to enforce. And neither, if enacted, would do much to advance Alberta’s interests. Cutting off oil exports to B.C. would do more harm to Alberta energy producers than B.C. energy consumers, who could quickly source their oil elsewhere, while the reforms Alberta seeks to equalization, whatever their other merits, would not return a nickel to the province, or its taxpayers.

So chalk these up, probably, to campaign exuberance. But the climate change stuff — that’s real enough, isn’t it? Sort of. Abolishing the province’s $30-a-tonne carbon tax isn’t so much the issue — in that event the federal “backstop” would simply kick in, and even if it did not the UCP itself has pledged to replace it with something very like a carbon tax, only on large emitters. The bigger red flag is the promise to eliminate the 100 megatonne cap on oilsands emissions.

There is little doubt of the cap’s importance to achieving the federal goal of reducing Canada’s overall emissions by 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, in line with our commitments at the Paris Agreement on Climate Change: a target we are nowhere close to meeting, nor even visibly headed toward. (Emissions rose to 716 MT in 2017, leaving them less than two per cent below their 2005 benchmark, with just 13 years to cut the other 28 per cent.)

The question is how the feds should respond. Much commentary has suggested the prime minister would have no choice, in the event Kenney lifts the cap, but to renege on his oft-stated pledge (“It will be built”) to see Trans Mountain through to completion. “The path (Kenney’s) on will likely force Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reject the Trans Mountain pipeline,” the economist Andrew Leach has written in an influential piece in Maclean’s.