The legality of the federal carbon tax will be decided in a matter of days. 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada is set to deliver their decision on the constitutionality of the federal government’s Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, and its application to some provinces, and not others, based on the strategies proposed by each province to reduce carbon emissions.  

The Saskatchewan government took their appeal of the carbon tax to the top court in the country after the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, in a 3-2 ruling, decided in favour of the federal government. Saskatchewan wasn’t alone in the appeal, ether, with Alberta and Ontario also launching challenges to the carbon tax. 

There were a number of intervenors in the case, including seven provinces, the Assembly of First Nations, and nearly two dozen others. The federal government also made submissions in the case. 

When the case was first heard by the Supreme Court in September, the Environment Minister at the time, Dustin Duncan, pointed to Saskatchewan’s Prairie Resilience Plan as the best option for the province. The plan includes a number of measures to reduce carbon emissions in the province, including controls for large emitters, and the options for those with smaller emissions to also enroll in the provincial plan. It doesn’t include an economy-wide carbon tax, unlike the federal government’s carbon tax levy. 

“We also take issue with the idea of the federal government levying a federal tax in select jurisdictions in Canada,” Duncan explained at the time. “The analogy to that would be the federal government having a different rate of GST in different provinces based on what the federal government thinks about provincial policy in terms of taxation.” 

The federal government has announced they are seeking to increase the carbon tax by $10 a year until it reaches $50 a tonne in 2022, then it will start to increase by $15 a tonne until it reaches $170 by 2030. Currently, Canada has the 11th highest carbon tax of the 46 nations that have one implemented at the national level.