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Yet McKenna sounded positively blithe this week about the ease with which she plans to deploy her “backstop” weapon, in responding to a letter from Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Dustin Duncan, who said the province could not accept her carbon tax. McKenna’s response: If Duncan’s government didn’t start taxing carbon at the minimum price she requires, “we would have no choice but to ensure that a price on pollution applies …. We would do so by applying the federal carbon pricing system in Saskatchewan.” It sounds so simple. Except the closer you examine her position, the weaker it seems.

There is already the matter of the constitutional clash that will form the basis of the Ford court case, over whether the feds even have the power to tax carbon, especially connected to resources. University of Saskatchewan constitutional law expert Dwight Newman thinks the provinces have “more of a case than a lot of people are giving them credit for.”

More to the point, no one has explained the logistics that would let McKenna make good on her ultimatum. The ability of a Canadian government to implement policy has always relied on the co-operation of provincial governments, notes Newman. Indeed, B.C.’s current NDP government, with its pipeline-stalling mischief, is right at this moment revealing just how powerless the federal government can appear when a province refuses to play along with it. Besides that, Newman points out that the federal government has never tried exercising the power to levy a specific tax on Canadians of one province but not another. Even if this one were willing to try, in the face of so many obvious constitutional problems, does it really have the tools and the stomach to monitor and bill for the carbon use of every farmer, factory, fuel pump and furnace in Saskatchewan?

McKenna makes it all sound so simple and straightforward, from her perch there on the edge of a minefield of untold and unprecedented legal and logistical difficulties. But this is a government that has yet to succeed in executing on anything remotely this complicated. At least it will be entertaining watching McKenna trying to collect carbon bills from ill-disposed farmers in Melfort, without an ounce of help from the province or municipalities.