Mandryk: Eyre injunction sets ugly precedent on notion of paying taxes

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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.

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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.

Essentially, this is the problem with the Government of Saskatchewan filing an injunction to block the CRA from accessing the province’s accounts so the federal agency can reclaim the carbon tax on home heating that the Sask. Party is now refusing to pay.

This development follows a CRA audit incited by the Sask. Party government’s rather public refusal to allow SaskEnergy to collect carbon levies for the federal Crown under the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (GGPPA). Saskatchewan as a whole has now been hit with that CRA term we all dread: “non-compliant.”

You likely remember the government furor this winter when provincial laws/regulations were changed so that the onus for this decision was transferred from executives at SaskEnergy to the soon-to-retire Crown Investments Corp. (CIC) Minister Dustin Duncan, who was willing to be dragged away in shackles to carbon tax jail out of principle. Of course, no one thought for a red-hot minute that it would come to that.

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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.

The absolutely boneheaded nonsense was hearing federal Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings admit the decision was made after lobbying by Liberal MPs from Atlantic Canada, where oil heating is most common — a remark that damaged whatever validity the carbon tax still held as public policy.

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.”

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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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