Honouring Suzuki a slap in the face to most Albertans

Are those people running Alberta’s largest university blind, naive or just plain wilful?

Why, for heaven’s sake, of all the deserving people on our planet, would the University of Alberta pick this exact time to give David Suzuki an honorary degree?

Do they not see what’s been happening in our province, which provides close to a billion dollars in taxpayer-funded revenue for their annual budget, now sitting at an astounding $1.868 billion?

Are they incapable of understanding what losing your job and fearing for your future is actually like? Or do they simply think they can take the money and thumb their refined noses at the rest of us?

Now we’re not talking about an invite to Canada’s most well-known environmentalist and opponent of what drives this province to speak at the Edmonton university. Places of higher learning should encourage speakers of all viewpoints to appear and present before young minds.

This isn’t about freedom of speech or diversity of views. No, this is the university itself honouring a man adamantly opposed to Alberta’s energy industry, while ordinary people are still reeling from the recession that hit more than two years ago.

This is also a time when our last hope of getting a new pipeline to tidewater is being squashed, thanks to the continual antics of those who would happily build a monument to Suzuki.

Maybe they just don’t give a darn. Hey, why would they?

After all, the higher-paid ones — recent numbers show 1,742 U of A folk rake in more than $126,000 a year — don’t have to worry about losing jobs or missing meals.

Not only do they have employment security, but also during the vicious economic downturn a few years ago, many of them even got fat raises.

Meanwhile, many of us outside of academia have stricken the words “pay hike” from our vocabulary.

So imagine you’re a coal miner in Hanna and, thanks to this government’s save the world carbon emission plan, the mine’s due to close and your job disappears. Those were good jobs — granted, not in the league of some ecology professor pulling in well over a quarter-million dollars, plus benefits, pensions and long summer holidays — but still enough to provide for your family.

Of course, the government, like many before and no doubt those to come, blathers on about compensation, diversification and retraining. But honestly, is some 45-year-old man who’s spent 20 years down the mine going to emerge as a code-writing genius or app designer after a few lessons at the local college? Or is central Alberta going to house Amazon’s second headquarters?

How do such people feel when they see a prestigious university in our provincial capital handing out an honorary degree to David Suzuki? Would a kick in the teeth about sum it up?

Even those champagne socialists that make up our current NDP government must feel a little abandoned. Here we have the premier — herself a graduate of the U of A — talking about buying a pipeline because of the current exasperation over Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain extension delay at the exact time her hometown university decides to honour Suzuki.

Well, much as they’d no doubt love to continue having their intellectual cake while gorging on it too, there approaches a reckoning.

We’re already running a $9-billion annual deficit in Alberta, and we’ve essentially linked any remote chance of balancing future books without big cuts or higher taxes on the success of an ocean-touching pipeline being built. Thanks to Suzuki and his disciples, that’s an increasingly forlorn hope.

So, sooner or later, this government, or the next one, will have to bite the bullet and end this ludicrous borrowing.

When that time arrives, it should remember this moment: one when the U of A showed what it thought about our community of Albertans.

There’s about $950 million a year doled out in taxpayer and resource revenue sitting there as a big, fat budgetary line item. Payback can be righteous.