The prime minister had some uncharacteristically blunt words last week for a carbon tax proposal by Stephane Dion's Liberals, saying it would "screw" the country.
On a visit to Saskatchewan, where oil is helping to drive a booming economy, Stephen Harper suggested the plan would be worse than the old national energy program.
That program, brought in by the federal Liberals in the 1980s, is still criticized for draining money from the West - especially Alberta - and sending it to Central Canada.
"(The carbon tax plan) is like the national energy program in the sense that the national energy program was designed to screw the West and really damage the energy sector - and this will do those things," Harper told a small crowd in Saskatoon. "This is different in that this will actually screw everybody across the country."
The Liberal plan would impose a carbon tax worth $15.4 billion a year - to be offset by an equivalent cut in income and business taxes and a boost in tax breaks for poor, elderly, northern and rural Canadians who stand to be hardest hit by the increased cost of necessities such as home-heating fuel.
It would initially peg the price of greenhouse gas emissions at $10 per tonne, rising to $40 per tonne in the fourth year.
Standing next to Harper, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said the carbon tax could hurt the province's economic development. Wall suggested such a plan could potentially force Saskatchewan back to "have-not" status once again.
Dion did not dispute that industry will pass along the cost of the carbon tax to consumers. But he argued that the Tories' plan to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) of big polluters or the NDP plan to impose a hard cap on emissions would produce the same result.
Although the plan is ostensibly motivated by the need to combat global warming, critics noted that it has curiously little to say about actually reducing GHGs. Indeed, the plan says only that Liberals "believe that our target should be" to reduce emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
While Dion's plan was panned by his political opponents, it won guarded praised from economists and environmentalists, some of whom suggested the carbon tax isn't high enough.
Reaction varied among provincial governments.
In British Columbia, which will introduce a carbon tax on all fossil fuels, including gasoline, starting July 1, Energy Minister Richard Neufeld suggested that Dion's decision not to apply the tax at the fuel pumps is "kind of a cheap way of going about it."
In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty, who had initially vetoed the idea of a carbon tax in Ontario, now says he "likes the sound" of Dion's plan.
