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TORONTO — The federal and Ontario governments are set to square off in the province’s top court this week over Ottawa’s climate change law in a fight experts say is as much political and ideological as it is legal.

At issue is the validity of Liberal government legislation that kicked in on April 1 and imposed a charge on gasoline and other fossil fuels as well as on industrial polluters. The law applies in those provinces that have no carbon-pricing regime of their own that meets national standards.

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Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government under Premier Doug Ford — supported by like-minded premiers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick — has denounced the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act as an illegal tax grab that will force up the price of gasoline and heating fuel.

Like Saskatchewan did recently — a decision there is pending — the Ontario government is asking its Court of Appeal to decide whether the federal law is constitutional.