I appreciate the answers to my question "is signing on to the plan a prerequite to getting the funding?"
From the answers, and assuring everybody that I am most certainly not a Canadian lawyer, and unqualified to comment except on general grounds, it sounds to me like the definitive answer won't come out until the courts rule.
Pretty much unless someone flinches first
"is signing on to the plan a prerequite to getting the funding?"
What the Feds proposed was that each jurisdiction had to develop their own (provincial) carbon tax (could be an outright tax or carbon trading, etc) and have it in place by a certain time.
The revenues generated from the individual programs would stay in the province where they were charged/collected and not be sent to Ottawa for redistribution.
In effect, it is a de facto sales tax to be administered by each province with no restrictions on how those monies were to be spent.
In the event that a province did not develop and implement a program, the Feds would impose one on the offending jurisdiction by virtue of clawing-back transfer payments from the Equalization Program
That said, there is no set Fed program that has to be adopted, but the funding you refer to is the Fed monies (Fed taxes payable) that are later redistributed back to each province
I thought the $62 Million was for green projects to be built in the Province.