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After first noting, as he has previously, that provinces representing 85% of the Canadian economy now either price carbon or intend to, with Ontario’s pending inclusion, Trudeau sketched a plan whereby Ottawa works with provinces and territories to set a national standard for carbon emission cuts, but leaves it to each to determine how. If the Liberals form government this fall, Trudeau pledged, such a system will unfold within 90 days of the conclusion of the United Nations climate change conference scheduled for December in Paris.

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Of course there’s risk in this collective approach, which hasn’t been in evidence around Ottawa for oh, nine years: It’s cumbersome, messy, and there’s no guarantee the provinces will agree. Ottawa risks becoming, as Trudeau père acidly put it, a “headwaiter to the provinces.”

But the historical models Trudeau fils cites are not inconsequential: The Canada Pension Plan, the National Child Benefit, the Gas Tax Fund, and Medicare. Plus, there’s this: It’s a pragmatic solution, if carbon is to be priced at all, given that the provinces, Alberta included, are already moving. If Stephen Harper himself were going to do this, this is how he would go about it.

The federal government does not have all the answers

The coded messages in the speech were intriguing. There were the repeated laudatory references to Prentice; there was the slam at Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s reviled National Energy Program, which we have heard before but which has been expanded for emphasis; and there was the assertion that “the federal government does not have all the answers.” It seems Trudeau proposes to purloin a Harper strategy that has mostly worked, his refusal to trample on areas of provincial jurisdiction, while abandoning one that hasn’t worked; his quixotic aversion to joining provincial and territorial leaders around a table.