A national environmental group wants Ottawa to tax Alberta’s energy exports. The last time that was tried, the courts said no, the rigs left, and Olds-Didsbury sent a separatist to the legislature.
After trade talks with Washington collapsed, Ontario’s premier and Alberta’s most recent former premier would use Alberta energy as a bargaining chip. That is a dangerous game. There is worse.
The Sierra Club, no friend to Alberta, sent a fundraising letter to Canadian inboxes four days after the collapse. It calls for the federal government to impose an export tax on the oil and natural gas we ship to the United States.
The proposal belongs to the economist Seth Klein, who set it at 15 per cent and costed it at “close to $25 billion” a year. What the letter adds is a sentence of its own. An export tax, it says, is “a Federal choice (not a provincial one) and one the Alberta Government has no grounds to oppose.”
No grounds?
In fact, there are three, and each is a matter of public record.
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