Economy
Scott Moe tells Trudeau he will stop collecting carbon tax unless Saskatchewan gets tax break
From LifeSiteNews
‘I cannot accept the Federal Government giving an affordability break to people in one part of Canada, but not here,’ the Saskatchewan premier said in an announcement on Monday.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe put Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on notice today by saying his province will stop collecting a federal carbon tax on natural gas used to heat homes come January 1, 2024, unless it gets a similar tax break that Atlantic Canadian provinces just got from the federal government for heating their homes.
“So, the Prime Minister chose to make life more affordable for families in one part of the country while leaving Saskatchewan families out in the cold. How is that fair to families here in our province, where affordability is also an issue, where winters are cold, and where most of us use natural gas to stay warm?” said Moe in a video posted today to X (formerly Twitter).
“I cannot accept the Federal Government giving an affordability break to people in one part of Canada, but not here. So today I am calling on the Federal Government to offer the same carbon tax exemption to Saskatchewan families by extending it to all forms of home heating, not just heating oil.”
Moe said that Trudeau should give Saskatchewan a tax break, as this is only “fair” for “Saskatchewan and Canadian families.”
“Hopefully that exemption will be provided soon,” he said.
Moe then turned up the heat on Trudeau. He said that if Trudeau does not give his province the same break as Atlantic provinces, “effective January 1st, Sask Energy will stop collecting and submitting the carbon tax on natural gas, effectively providing Saskatchewan residents with the very same exemption that the federal government is giving heating oil in Atlantic Canada.”
Moe said that while the federal government may say what he is contemplating doing is “illegal and that you simply cannot choose to collect and pay your taxes,” which he added in “most” cases he would “agree with,” it’s the “federal government that has created two classes of taxpayer, by providing an exemption for heating with an exemption that really only applies in one part of the country and effectively excludes Saskatchewan.”
Moe said that his job as premier is to make sure “Saskatchewan residents are treated fairly and equally with our fellow Canadians in other parts of the country.”
“And that’s what I am doing today,” he added.
Moe said the “real solution” for the entire issue with high heating bills thanks to a carbon tax is for the “federal government to scrap the entire carbon tax on everyone and everything.”
As it currently stands, provinces collect the carbon tax on behalf of the federal government.
Late last week, amid dismal polling numbers that show his government will be defeated in a landslide by the Conservative Party come the next election, Trudeau announced he was pausing the collection of the carbon tax on home heating oil in Atlantic Canadian provinces for three years.
However, while making the announcement, Trudeau said the goal of the pause was to encourage locals to ditch their home heating oil units for electric heat pumps and said his government would be giving out free pumps to many homeowners.
LifeSiteNews reported earlier this month how Trudeau’s carbon tax is costing Canadians hundreds of dollars annually, as government rebates it gives out are not enough to compensate for high fuel costs.
As it stands now, Canadians who live in a province that does not have their own carbon tax scheme fall under the federal carbon pricing scheme and pay $65 per tonne. The Trudeau government has a goal of $170 per tonne by 2030, however.
This will increase the costs of everything. A recent report revealed that a carbon tax of more than $350 per tonne is needed to reach Trudeau’s net zero goals by 2050.
Moe and Alberta Premier Smith blast Trudeau as ‘danger’ to confederation
Over the weekend, both Moe and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who also opposes the carbon tax, blasted Trudeau as being a danger to the confederation, after his Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings said those provinces “need to elect more Liberals in the Prairies so that we can have that conversation as well.”
Smith and Moe said that Hutchings’ comments show the carbon tax has nothing to do with the environment but is all about “politics.”
Saskatchewan is not alone in opposing Trudeau’s carbon tax and “net zero” environmental goals.
Both it and Alberta have repeatedly promised to place the interests of their people above the Trudeau government’s “unconstitutional” demands while consistently reminding the federal government that their infrastructures and economies depend upon oil, gas, and coal.
The Trudeau government’s current environmental goals – in lockstep with the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” – include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades.
From Resource Works
By Geoff Russ
For major projects, what is old is new again
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s second wave of “nation-building projects” sounds transformative: six new energy and mining proposals, plus a northern corridor, added to the first tranche unveiled in September, and included in the freshly passed federal budget for the fiscal year.
Together, Ottawa says, they amount to more than $116 billion in investment and are central to “realizing Canada’s full potential as an energy superpower.” That is the pitch in the federal news release.
Look closely, though, and a different picture emerges. For major projects, what is old is new again. Almost every file now being “fast-tracked” was already on the books, sometimes for a decade or more.
The new referrals to the Major Projects Office (MPO) are all familiar: the Nisga’a-led Ksi Lisims LNG terminal on B.C.’s north coast; BC Hydro’s North Coast Transmission Line; Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins; Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Matawinie mine north of Montréal; Northcliff’s Sisson tungsten project in New Brunswick; and the Inuit-owned Iqaluit Nukkiksautiit hydro project in Nunavut. The “Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor” in B.C. and the Yukon is added as a long-range concept.
Long timelines and longstanding obstacles
None of these is a fresh idea. As the Globe and Mail notes in a project-by-project rundown, Ksi Lisims has been in development for years and already faces two Federal Court challenges from nearby First Nations and opposition from Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders who fought Coastal GasLink. The North Coast Transmission Line was identified in 2023, with B.C. legislation to fast-track it and term-sheet co-ownership deals with First Nations already in place. The Sisson mine has been stalled at the pre-construction stage for more than a decade, despite earlier approvals and new public money to update its feasibility study.
Iqaluit hydro is hardly a novelty either. As Globe reporting shows, dam concepts near the city have been studied since the mid-2000s, with the current Inuit-owned proposal building on that earlier work and backed by federal engineering funds. The Crawford nickel project was acquired in 2019 and has spent years lining up investors and a complex financing stack, documented in both CBC and Financial Post coverage. Matawinie received its Quebec authorization in 2021, has an impact-benefit agreement with the local Atikamekw Nation and now enjoys federal price-floor guarantees on graphite.
The first tranche, announced in September, follows the same pattern. LNG Canada Phase 2 in Kitimat, new nuclear at Darlington, Contrecoeur container capacity at the Port of Montréal, McIlvenna Bay in Saskatchewan and the Red Chris expansion in B.C. were all in various stages of planning long before Carney entered office. The MPO is not inventing a new project pipeline; it is trying to accelerate the one Ottawa already had.
Acceleration is the point — and industry welcomes it
Acceleration is, to be fair, the point. The Calgary-based MPO, led by former Trans Mountain head Dawn Farrell, is designed to run permits in parallel, not one after another, and to coordinate financing through bodies like the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund. Farrell told CBC that work which might have taken “five or six more years” could be cut to roughly two. In a country where large projects regularly die of regulatory exhaustion, that is significant.
Industry likes the signal. Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby says MPO referral “puts us in the fast lane,” even without the more controversial “national interest” label in Bill C-5 that would allow cabinet to set aside parts of the Fisheries Act, Species at Risk Act or Impact Assessment Act. Inuit proponents of the Iqaluit project welcome Carney’s description of their hydro plan as a breakthrough for Arctic sovereignty, replacing millions of litres of diesel.
But a superpower strategy this is not
Still, if this is what becoming an “energy superpower” looks like, it is a modest start.
Notably absent from Carney’s list is any new oil pipeline. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spent months pushing a concept for a bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to the northern B.C. coast, doing provincial groundwork in the hope a private proponent will one day take it over. A BBC report sets out the feud with B.C. Premier David Eby, who dismisses the idea as “fictional” and “political” and insists no company wants it, accusing Smith of jeopardizing B.C.’s LNG ambitions. Smith has called that stance “un-Canadian.”
Western frustration is growing. In the National Post, Whitecap Resources chief executive Grant Fagerheim warns of “fury from Alberta and Saskatchewan” if a pipeline to tidewater is never prioritized and argues producers are tired of a U.S.-dominated system where Canadian barrels sell at a discount while others capture the margins. He favours an energy corridor carrying oil, gas, power and rail, not just more rhetoric about nation-building.
Northern ambitions lag behind rhetoric
Another gap is the North. The Indigenous-led Arctic Gateway partnership, Manitoba and Ottawa are already spending heavily on the Hudson Bay Railway and planning new storage and loading systems to expand the Port of Churchill for grain, potash, critical minerals and Arctic resupply. Carney talks up a “huge host of opportunities” in northern Manitoba, but Churchill sits only on the MPO’s lower-profile “transformative strategies” list, with a full plan now pushed out to 2026.
Meanwhile, the one project that has fundamentally shifted Canada’s oil export position is the long-delayed Trans Mountain expansion. As Resource Works points out, TMX now sends diluted bitumen from Burnaby to Asia, shrinking the old “captive discount” and giving Canada genuine leverage in global markets. But TMX predates Carney’s government by more than a decade and only exists because Ottawa nationalized a struggling private pipeline to get it built.
Evolution, not revolution
Carney’s major-projects push is real, and for the companies involved, the prospect of faster permits and clearer federal backing is very good news. Yet for a government that talks about mobilizing a trillion dollars and remaking Canada as an energy superpower, the current list is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For now, Ottawa is mostly trying to build what was already on the drawing board. The tougher choices on pipelines, ports and interprovincial trade still lie in front of it.
Headline photo credit to THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
From the Fraser Institute
By Jason Childs
From 2015 to 2024, the government sector in Canada—including federal, provincial and municipal—added 950,000 jobs, which accounted for roughly 30 per cent of total employment growth in the country, finds a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“In Canada, employment in the government sector has skyrocketed over the last 10 years,” said Jason Childs, a professor of economics at the University of Regina, senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Examining the Growth of Public-Sector Employment Since 2015.
Over the same 10-year period (2015-2024), government-sector employment grew at an annual average rate of 2.7 per cent compared to only 1.7 per cent for the private sector. The study also examines employment growth by province. Government employment (federal, provincial, municipal) grew at a higher annual rate than the private sector in every province except Manitoba over the 10-year period.
The largest gaps between government-sector employment growth compared to the private sector were in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. The smallest gaps were in Alberta and Prince Edward Island.
“The larger government’s share of employment, the greater the ultimate burden on taxpayers to support government workers—government does not pay for itself,” Childs said.
A related study (Measuring the Cost to Canadians from the Growth in Public Administration, also authored by Childs) finds that, from 2015 to 2024, across all levels of government in Canada, the number of public administrators (many of who
work in government ministries, agencies and other offices that do not directly provide services to the public) grew by more than 328,000—or 3.5 per cent annually (on average).
“If governments want to reduce costs, they should look closely at the size of their public administration,” Childs said.
Examining the Growth of Public Sector Employment Since 2015
Jason Childs
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