In February 2019 the Saskatchewan and federal governments are meeting in the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals for a reference case over the constitutionality of the federal government’s carbon pricing measures. You can find a neat summary of the case on the website of the Saskatchewan Association for Environmental Law here.
Climate Justice Saskatoon is one of many civil society organizations intervening in the case, and we are part of a group of 10 organizations intervening together under the heading of Climate Justice et al.*
This page will be updated as the case proceeds. You can find our media release, dated February 12, below.
Our motivation for intervening stems not from a conviction that carbon pricing offers a silver-bullet climate solution, and should not be considered an endorsement of an exclusively free-market approach to addressing the climate crisis. Neither is it an endorsement of the federal government’s own targets and plans relating to climate change, of which we have been consistently critical. Rather, we are motivated to intervene because Saskatchewan has failed to devise a credible climate strategy of its own. This case represents another attempt by the Saskatchewan government to shirk its responsibility to take climate action seriously. There is an urgent need for the province to step up and offer meaningful solutions. You can read this op-ed by Mark Bigland-Pritchard, CJS member and author of our group’s affidavit, to get a sense of our approach.
The Saskatchewan Environmental Society recently published a critical analysis of the SK government’s climate plan, which highlights its many shortcomings. You can find it here.
A recent episode of From the Ground Up also covered the case and why it matters in Saskatchewan, and you can listen to it here:
*The other 9 organizations in the coalition include: National Farmers’ Union; Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation; Council of Canadians (CoC) Prairies-NWT Regional Office; CoC Regina Chapter; CoC Saskatoon Chapter; Saskatchewan Coalition for Sustainable Development; SaskEV; Youth of the Earth; and New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance