Article content

Days after Saskatchewan released a study purporting to show that Ottawa’s carbon tax plan will cost the province billions, a federal minister dismissed the research as “irrelevant.”

“They appear to have modelled a proposal that no one is proposing,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who represents the Regina—Wascana riding, said in an interview.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Ralph Goodale calls provincial carbon tax study 'divorced from reality' Back to video

He contends the government-funded study appears biased, especially since one of its co-authors was recently an employee of Saskatchewan’s Environment Ministry.

Goodale also pointed to federal numbers that suggest the losses from carbon pricing would be a “rounding error” for the national economy, which would sustain less than a 0.1 per cent hit to GDP in 2022. But he was not immediately able to produce provincial-level data to counter claims that Saskatchewan is a special case.

That’s something Environment Minister Dustin Duncan criticized the federal government for failing to do last week, as he announced a study contracted out to the University of Regina’s Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainable Communities. He said it showed that Saskatchewan’s export-dependent economy would suffer $16 billion in lost growth by 2030.