There is a case that this law has been unjustly applied — although the more obvious case is that the federal Liberals are bungling idiots.
If one wants to be popular in Saskatchewan, the best possible thing to do these days is pick a fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberal government.
Scratch that …
The best possible thing you can do to be popular in Saskatchewan is pick a fight with Trudeau and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). Better yet, pick a fight in which you frame the much-despised latter acting as henchmen stooges for the much-despised former.
It may be the popular political thing to do, but consider how it denies fundamental conventions we need in order to function:
— The law is the law. There are a lot of laws we might disagree with, but things quickly turn messy if we get to choose to obey only the ones we like.
— By the same principle, we all need to pay our taxes. There’s also plenty of taxes we don’t like, but again, things get messy pretty quickly if we can tell already-badly-in-debt governments we aren’t paying unpopular taxes, either.
To be clear, there is a case that this law has been unjustly applied — although the more obvious case is that the federal Liberals are bungling idiots.
The bungling idiocy on the part of the feds wasn’t just the concept of completely lifting the carbon tax from oil home heating — especially given that the idea of a carbon tax is to get people to move off dirty greenhouse gas pollutants.
Fast forward to Trudeau’s smarmy response about ticking off the CRA at their own peril, and the stage was set for a raging prairie fire. For the Sask. Party government, it’s even easier to stoke the flames with politics than it is with principles.
In her social media post (the government generally refuses to issue press releases in such situations because it prefers to put out its own spin first) Justice Minister Bronwyn Eyre justified breaking the law as a reasonable response to a “cash grab” by federal Liberals who don’t like “when someone disagrees with them.”
To hear any minister engage in such demonizing political hyperbole is seldom helpful in formulating policy that works. Alas, this issue is no longer about policy. The carbon tax has become pure politics.
Even as such, there’s something rather disturbing in the high-dudgeon justifications from the Attorney General of Saskatchewan suggesting that it’s somehow OK to break the law and not pay our taxes.
Again, we don’t get to pick or choose which laws we obey or which taxes we pay …
… Or maybe we do now, after Eyre’s post this week. If so, that’s a big problem.
Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
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