While provincial and federal environment ministers were meeting in Montreal, to discuss carbon taxes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau trumped their discussions by announcing in Parliament, at the same time, he would be imposing a national carbon tax.
Newfoundland and Saskatchewan environment ministers walked out. Premier Brad Wall was aghast in his response. “I cannot believe that while the country’s environment ministers were meeting on a so-called collaborative climate change plan, the Prime Minister stood in the House of Commons and announced a carbon tax unilaterally.
“This meeting is not worth the CO2 emissions it took for environment ministers to get there.
“The level of disrespect shown by the prime minister and his government today is stunning. This is a betrayal of the statements made by the prime minister in Vancouver this March. And this new tax will damage our economy.”
For all those talking heads around the country who seem to think Wall doesn’t give a damn about the whole CO2 thing, they are dead wrong. If I stand on my roof, I can see the $1.5 billion investment into carbon capture and storage this province made in recent years, about $1,300 for every man, woman and child. Sure, it took a while for the kinks to be worked out, but the Boundary Dam 3 Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Project works. It is, right now, preventing more than 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each and every day, and still allows us to burn coal for power.
No one else has done that. Ontario shut down its coal, and created a horrible green power strategy that has doubled bills, pays huge subsidies to wind and solar generators while selling excess power for next to nothing to American markets. Now Alberta is on the same track, shutting its coal fleet down in coming years, assuming the NDP is around long enough in government to make it happen.
So Saskatchewan has taken the risk, put down the money and it is working. But will we get credit for it?
Former Saskatchewan environment minister Herb Cox pointed out something this past summer after a tour of the carbon capture facility. Paying for this plant has been something of an implicit tax for Saskatchewan’s people. Indeed, they did pay for it, through our Crown-owned utility. And they will pay for it again and again, if carbon capture is implemented on the other generating units.
What most people don’t seem to cotton onto is that this initial project was for just a small portion of the power plant, one generator unit out of six (the two oldest and smallest have now been retired, so now it’s out of four units). There’s still another three units to go at Boundary Dam, two at Poplar River and one at Shand.
If Saskatchewan spends the billions of dollars to retrofit all these coal plants with carbon capture units, we might be looking at a $7 to $10 billion investment, maybe more. Doing so would dramatically cut our carbon dioxide emissions, but would be such a strain on the province’s finances, it could be unbearable. The decisions on the next Boundary Dam units need to be made in the next few years.
Would a carbon tax, implemented by Ottawa, but payable internally to the province, be used to finance such a program? If so, would it be a satisfactory response to the feds? Or do they just want to see our economy ground to a halt, like the Ontario Liberal government has been striving to do to their province for years?
Will we have to pay for retrofitting our coal plants and pay a carbon tax on top of that? If so, maybe we should just build a massive nuclear plant near Estevan instead, using the Rafferty reservoir for cooling.
Saskatchewan has already walked the walk. We’ve spent huge money on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. How much will be enough?
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
