The greatest and most characteristic failure of the Trudeau administration has been its war against the oil and gas industry. It was so-early signaled. There is, for example, this brilliant pat-on-his-own-back — a yoga twist Mr. Justin has perfectly mastered — from nine years ago:
“I am pleased to announce that we will keep our commitment to implement a moratorium on crude oil tanker shipping on British Columbia’s north coast.” [bold, links added]
From out of that deep but callow mindset came the blocking of pipelines, the wretched, useless (and in this time of rampant inflation) insulting so-called “carbon taxes,” the supine genuflections to the international global warming extremists, the hobbling of a mighty natural resource, and latterly the incredible elevation of a one-time Greenpeace activist and tower-climber, Steven Guilbeault (name his other qualifications), to a ministry in a supposedly mature national government.
The second greatest failure is a corollary of the first: the disregard, perhaps reaching to contempt, for the interests of the Western provinces. It amounts to the prime minister establishing a two-tier Confederation.
I am very well aware that I have made this observation many times before, but that puts no halt on my restating it: If oil and gas were the principal industries of Ontario, or especially Quebec, a drawing of an oil pipeline, or better yet that of an oil barrel, would long ago have supplanted the maple leaf on the Canadian flag.
How did global warming ever become the principal policy and obsession of the government of this vast, cold, main northern nation?
If Canada were one of those tiny islands that shoot out warnings that they will be submerged in the apocalypse to come, it might be understandable.
The Maldives, for example, have staged their worry on this point. They held a televised “underwater cabinet meeting” to “raise awareness” of global warming. They gurgled very impressively, air bubbles drifting upwards, but, note, they still have land-based governance.
But Canada? Here’s a raw question too rarely asked — what’s our concern in all this? Why is global warming the principal and sternest policy of the Canadian government? Can we change China, India, and Russia by our example?
Beyond the burnishing of Trudeau’s credentials as the most self-advertised woke politician, what is it all about? Is Canada a heat furnace? Does Newfoundland threaten the global thermostat?
With the Canadian press asking stern questions about “carbon emissions policy” and which party has the “best” one, will no one ask the essential question: What benefit to Canada flows from “carbon reduction” schemes?
Why does the Canadian government embrace global warming as the principal theme of national governance? Most succinctly, will no one in the press gallery ask the prime minister this question: What does it matter what we do?
Are there not wells to clean, passport lineups to shorten, inflation to worry about, estrangement from the Confederation to address?
Next question: Why has an international agenda, supported by every liberal billionaire and dogmatist of the warming crusade, become the key, near-genetic, policy of the Trudeau administration?
As Hillary Clinton so famously asked, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Can no one in the national press ask why it is important, or in any way consequential, or has any impact on any other government in the world, that Trudeau taxes Canadian gasoline and heating fuel in the “fight against global warming?”
Why his personal and shallow preoccupations, and those of his ideologically driven mentor, Gerald Butts, are shaping the destiny of our nation? Canada is not a footnote to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It may be fine for cabinet ministers flying abroad, a PM with his private air accommodation, and MPs with solid salaries not to care about pump prices or the jump in food costs and mortgage payments, to ignore reality and stick with the global warming fixation.
But it is not for most Canadians, and certainly not for the poorest of them, which should always be our care.
And equally to the point, now that the blizzard of scandals and missteps, the airport clogs, the passport shambles, the WE scandals, and the summoning of the near wartime Emergencies Act, have precipitated a drastic fall in the polls and signaled the “horror” of “Trumpian” Pierre Poilievre in the ascendant, would it be possible for the Trudeau government to stop role-playing on the international stage and tend to the less glamorous business of keeping Canada secure and stable?
The current administration is so far out of touch I am not sure a measurement for the distance is available.
Read more at National Post
Thanks Rex. As usual, you remain one of the few sane voices in our left-wing, purported science loving and completely science ignorant media. Life on earth is carbon based. All life dies without CO2. Because life is composed entirely of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. That carbon in our carbon-based life all comes from CO2 – carbon dioxide. And life was born in an environment with more than twenty times the life essential CO2 than today. Photosynthesis evolved a short 200 million years after life was born in a world about 3.8 billion years ago. Born in an atmosphere entirely devoid of oxygen. Photosynthesis is, without doubt, the most important biological process in life on earth – the “environment.” And has been for 3.6 billion years. We have known this for a hundred years. Photosynthesis paints the environment green with its green pigmented enzyme chlorophyll. It converts sunlight energy plus CO2 plus H2O into high-energy sugar bonds and releases the excess oxygen into our entire atmospheric supply of breathable O2. It is the green source of all life on earth. It provides all of life’s energy and all of our breathable oxygen. When we use fossil fuels (the only energy that comes from life), 85% of the world’s energy they not only make us the best fed, longest living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. As a beneficial consequence, using them recycles the two most important ingredients of life on earth – CO2 and H2O. The exact opposite of pollution. Because when CO2 levels shrink below 2,000ppm in our atmosphere, life literally begins to starve for more. That is the science of CO2 fertility. It happens because we are all made from the stuff. Those are the basic interrelationships between fossil fuel energy, life, and the environment. Fossil fuels are the only green energy. Because using them makes life greener, stronger, more drought tolerant, and more abundant. I wonder if “journalists” will ever discover the facts of life? Barry Bateman, farmer with a B.Sc. Advanced (biology)
Excellent post Barry.
The other thing to ask people is “Name one thing about life which has gotten worse over the last 100 years?”
There is one thing that did get worse. It happens to be something that the governments can actually do something about.
Income taxes.
Canada is in a mess with that Pinhead running their whole Nation into the round over a totally fake crisis
There is a word Ron DeSantis loves: SnowBirds. Think about it.
Cheers
Judas Trudeau is selling us out to
Mount Olympus type rulers. Democracy here has been subjugated to decrees from the Green Gods of globalism. Canadian prosperity has suffered immensely. Income from our energy resources could resuscitate our health care system, if only Trudeau cared more about his “subjects” than his wokeness.
Of course Rex Murphy nails it again.
The Great White North would benefit from some warming.