Making Federalism Work for Climate Change: Canada's Division of Powers Over Carbon Taxes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing agreement in Canada that we need carbon pricing policies. Indeed, Quebec and British Columbia have forged ahead with carbon taxes, and the Liberal opposition has included a carbon tax in its most recent platform. One is tempted to simply point to the respective federal and provincial taxation powers for jurisdictional authority.However, and perhaps surprisingly, the taxation powers are not the optimal source of authority. This paper shows that both levels of government have authority to implement carbon taxes under various heads of power, depending on the measure’s design. Federally, carbon taxes could be justified under the national concern branch of the POGG power, and possibly under the criminal law, trade and commerce and taxation powers. While the property and civil rights power, taxation power and authority over natural resources might justify carbon taxes provincially, the licensing power offers the strongest source of authority. Analysis of Quebec and B.C.’s measures show that they were likely designed to fit within this licensing power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".