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The federal Liberals were, curiously, still calling it the “Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change” on Tuesday when they unveiled the details of the carbon tax they’ll be imposing on any provinces that don’t already have one. But that certainly gives a pretty good indication just how detached the entire plan has come from reality.

It is after all a stretch at this point to keep referring to it as “pan-Canadian,” the Liberals’ preferred original term intended to signal that it was an agreement between the provinces, territories and Ottawa. Now nearly half the provinces part of the original negotiations two years ago are rebelling against the plan to varying degrees and still others are threatening to.

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And pretending this any longer has anything to do with “fighting climate change,” as the government continued to insist Tuesday, takes yet more gall. It was just a couple of weeks ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shredded that pretext, having declared that for a carbon tax to be effective in saving the climate from apocalyptical warming it would have to start at least at US$135 a tonne and maybe even rise to US$5,500 a tonne by 2030. The Liberals’ tax starts at $20 and rises to $50. Projections currently show they won’t even meet their commitments to 2016’s Paris climate agreement unless its at least $200 a tonne, although that reality was also inverted Tuesday as the federal government publicly pretended that meeting its Paris promise was well underway without challenges.