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McKenna said she’s “perplexed” by Pallister’s move, since Ottawa is still in the middle of reviewing Manitoba’s plan to determine whether it meets the federal standard.

Under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, provinces that don’t have at least a $20-per-tonne price on carbon emissions by Jan. 1 will have such a price applied by Ottawa. All revenues from it are to be returned to people of the province where the money is collected but the details about how that rebate system will work have yet to be announced.

To avoid having the federal price imposed on them, all provinces had to submit their carbon pricing plans by Sept. 1 and McKenna told The Canadian Press recently that reviews of all those plans were ongoing. Speaking a few days before Manitoba’s pull-back, she said only Saskatchewan and Ontario were clearly lacking.

Saskatchewan’s government has rejected a carbon price from Day 1 and is planning to sue Ottawa over it. Ontario’s new Conservative government under Doug Ford cancelled that province’s cap and trade system almost before the ink on its swearing-in papers was dry.

Manitoba is now on that list, and it seems likely both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island will be found lacking because their plans are to largely use existing programs rather than introduce new taxes.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Newfoundland hasn’t made public its plan. Nova Scotia has a cap-and-trade regime on its big industrial emitters and it’s not clear yet if that will meet Ottawa’s requirement for a broad-based carbon price.