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The tanker ban, they added, is just the putrid icing on the toxic C-69 cake

There is some firm language in the premiers’ letter. They warn that “The federal government must recognize the exclusive role provinces and territories have over the management of our non-renewable natural resource development or risk creating a Constitutional crisis.” C-48 in particular, they say, “will have detrimental effects on national unity.”

This does not seem like an especially outrageous warning to deliver. Canada is, the last time anyone checked, a federation. Because Ford’s name is on the letter, the signatories represent more than half the country’s population, and in particular the interest of that half in resource revenue and jobs. The tanker ban, almost by definition, sacrifices the general welfare of a resource-reliant national economy and federal treasury for the perceived protection of one thinly populated region. That may be a worthwhile tradeoff on utilitarian grounds, but from a national unity standpoint it is inescapably what it is: a choice between what two different groups of Canadians want.

Photo by ChCristinne Muschi/Bloomberg

But for some reason, as my colleagues Don Braid and Matt Gurney have described, the PM went kinda bananas, calling the signers of the letter “absolutely irresponsible” and accusing them of “threatening national unity” by pointing out the disunifying nature of the Liberal bills. Trudeau added that “Anyone who wants to be prime minister, like Andrew Scheer, needs to condemn those attacks on national unity.”