Canadian Climate Federalism: Parliament’s Ample Constitutional Authority to Legislate GHG Emissions through Regulations, a National Cap and Trade Program, or a National Carbon Tax
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has committed the government to do what is needed to ensure Canada meets or exceeds its national climate targets under the Paris Agreement. While he has promised to work collaboratively with the provinces in establishing a pan-Canadian clean growth and climate framework, it is clear that some new federal climate laws will be required. There are many factors involved in selecting and designing climate policies, one of which is constitutional jurisdiction. This article analyzes Parliament’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and implement a carbon price, either through a national carbon tax, a national emissions trading scheme or other regulations. Taking into account recent jurisprudence and previous scholarship, the article considers five federal powers: the national concern and emergency powers of Peace, Order and Good Government (P.O.G.G.), criminal law, taxation, trade and commerce, and the declaratory power. It also considers the spending power. The analysis shows that there is ample authority within the Constitution for a strong federal role in regulating GHG emissions and pricing carbon without displacing appropriately scoped provincial climate programs. While thoughtful legislative drafting will be important, ultimately the Canadian Constitution’s division of powers is adequately equipped to deal with what may be the greatest public policy challenge of our time. In fact, climate change is perhaps the quintessential issue for engaging the tools of cooperative federalism and progressive interpretation of our Constitution.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".