SaskPower carbon tax to be retroactive to Jan. 1

There’s going to be an extra, extra charge on Saskatchewan power bills as of April.

The carbon tax will start showing up on bills for this month, but so will a retroactive charge for the carbon tax for the previous three months. SaskPower let customers know about this in their bills for March.

Because of how SaskPower is classified under the federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, it had to start tallying the carbon tax as of Jan. 1. But, as of late December, the company didn’t have final details on how the tax would be applied to different power generation sources, like coal and natural gas, according to an email from a SaskPower spokesperson.

Minister responsible for SaskPower Dustin Duncan said the standard by which SaskPower would have to pay the carbon tax changed two or three times between the internal announcement of the tax and late last year.

“The situation has been very fluid …,” he said. “It’s hard for us to get a handle on that, though, when it seems like the goalposts keep shifting.”

Duncan said the Crown corporation decided to wait until April to put the carbon tax on customers’ bills so it could finalize its plans and because most people understood that the tax would come into effect April 1.

Customers won’t have to pay the tax for the first three months in one chunk, though; it will be spread across the nine remaining bills for the year.

SaskPower estimates the carbon tax will cost customers $18 more for the 2019 year, but it will go up as the carbon tax rises. Duncan said he’s concerned about the federal government not having said what’s going to happen with the tax past 2022 and that it could go up even further.

SaskEnergy bills will not have the same retroactive charge. It’s classified differently than SaskPower, so it’s only charging the carbon tax as of April 1.