Since taking his seat in the Alberta legislature as leader of the province's official opposition, Jason Kenney has renewed his social media crusade against carbon taxes.  According to Kenney, instituting these taxes were supposed to buy the "social licence" necessary to get new pipelines approved, and with protests still happening with the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, Kenney's facile read of the situation has been that the exercise was nothing but political theatre, and so those carbon taxes should be scrapped.  The problem of course is that Kenney is engaging in his own particular brand of political theatre and is being a bit disingenuous along the way.  Shocking, I know.

Now, by way of context, there has been a bit of backtracking by some environmental advocates when it comes to the promises made around Alberta's climate plan.  Notable activist Tzeporah Berman, for example, took part in the process and has since disavowed it completely, declaring that oil should stay in the ground.  BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver once gave glowing support of the Alberta plan, but as soon as he found himself in a position with a modicum of power, he too has come out against it and is agitating against the Trans Mountain expansion.  So Kenney does have a bit of a point in that the cooperation that the plan was supposed to have achieved has not gone as planned, which is fine.  But Kenney's subsequent rhetoric takes that and blows it all out of proportion, to the point of being mendacious.  Nobody especially Justin Trudeau promised that that there wouldn't be protests.

The Alberta climate plan, which includes a carbon tax, was supposed to allay the concern that Ottawa would impose a plan of their own the federal carbon price backstop specifically as well as limits being imposed by other jurisdictions, whether it was BC, California, or the European Union, as it would impact Alberta's economy.  It was also part of the bargain made with the federal government under Trudeau in order to give him the political capital necessary to approve pipelines like Trans Mountain, so that he could point to the hard cap on emissions in Alberta, and the fact that carbon pricing would drive emissions reductions with a market mechanism.

And that's what this really goes back to Kenney rails about the carbon tax not buying social licence, so it's useless.  Other conservatives across the country are parroting the lines Scott Moe in Saskatchewan claiming that he can win a court challenge against Ottawa on opposing it (he can't),  Lisa MacLeod in Ontario railing that the only use of a carbon price is to go into general revenue, Michelle Rempel concern trolling that the price hasn't reduced emissions (never mind that it actually hasn't been implemented federally yet) it all goes back to the same disingenuous notion that simply instituting a price is magic.  The point, meanwhile, is that it sends a market signal, and it forces consumers and companies to look for ways to reduce their emissions in order to drive down their rising carbon costs.  And you would think that conservatives would be all about using the power of the free market to find the lowest-cost way to achieve emission reductions rather than burdensome regulations and red tape, but apparently not.  And Kenney has now added a new private member's bill to his arsenal that would demand a referendum every time a government planned to raise the carbon taxes, but given that a requirement for referendums on tax increases turned California into a fiscal basket case, I'm not sure why Kenney is so keen to repeat that disaster.

Amidst this disingenuous talk about the carbon taxes, we have Kenney opening up a new front of constitutional rhetoric on Kinder Morgan which is just that rhetoric.  Kenney has taken to claiming that Trudeau needs to use section 92(10)(c) of the Constitution Act, 1867 in order to declare the pipeline to be in the national interest and to ensure that local laws don't impede it, as BC is threatening.  The problem again is that this particular section only applies to works that are within a province, and this pipeline is not.  It crosses a provincial boundary and is already under federal jurisdiction, making a declaration of 92(10)(c) at best useless, and at worst creating confusing precedent that would declare a federal project to be provincial and then federal again.  And Kenney knows this, but is deliberately sowing confusion to try and make it look like Trudeau is being useless on the file never mind that Trudeau and his cabinet have consistently said that the pipeline will get built, and that this is in the hands of the quasi-judicial National Energy Board and not cabinet at this stage in order to drive the politics of anger and resentment because that's how he thinks he'll gain power.

And he and the rest have stated on numerous occasions that Trudeau may say he supports the pipeline but is willing to kill it with delay like he did with Energy East which again, is a falsehood that ignores the economics behind why Energy East was abandoned.  In that case, it was the most expensive and furthest pipeline that was no longer necessary when Keystone XL went ahead.  The biggest clue was the fact that TransCanada moved their transportation services arrangements from Energy East to Keystone XL, which was a symptom that there would not be enough barrels of oil to go through both pipelines if they both got built.  And even if a Harper-led government had won in 2015 and forced Energy East through approvals, the oilsands producers would have been against it because there would be overbuilt capacity (to say nothing of court challenges like the one that ultimately scuttled Northern Gateway).

Kenney's campaign of falsehoods should be fact-checked more vigorously than it has been, and too many media outlets are letting him off the hook and taking what he says at face value, particularly his constitutional claims.  He also needs to be aware that he's playing with fire by stoking the kind of anger that he is.  While it may work for some populists, it can absolutely backfire, and Kenney should beware that he risks his whole project blowing up in his face.