PIPELINE DICTATORS.

They might seem unrelated, but there are multiple connections between Justin Trudeau’s first Prime Ministerial visit to China and protesters shutting down the National Energy Board hearings on the Energy East pipeline in Montreal this week.

In China, the state shuts down individuals. In Canada, individuals can apparently shut down the state. Or at least they can shut down any state apparatus they don’t like. But then the Liberal government had already undermined this particular piece of apparatus by declaring that the NEB needed to restore a credibility that it had never really lost.

There has been much criticism of how two panel members met privately with former Quebec premier Jean Charest while he was consulting for Energy East sponsor TransCanada. Undoubtedly an error of judgment, but surely it is far more significant that a self-righteous beefy brawler can shut down public hearings by rushing the panel like an irate batter charging the mound. Then there was Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, who had come not to offer input to a process of weighing costs and benefits, but to just say no.

Certainly, M. Coderre and his fellow mayors democratically represent the people of the Montreal region, but they and their constituents have been sucked into anti-pipeline hysteria promoted by radical groups who have as little regard for democracy as they have for truth. Which brings us back to that China trip.

While human rights and the Canola kerfuffle will be high on Trudeau’s agenda ahead of the G20 meeting in Guangzhou next weekend, climate policy looms above all else as a threat to both wealth and freedom, while pipeline policy — or lack of it — is a particular irritant to Sino- Canadian relations.

The Chinese hardly have to play a hypocritical game when it comes to climate. President Obama was so desperate to push his legacy as the modern King Canute who stopped the rise of the oceans that he announced a “landmark” agreement with China two years ago, which involved them committing to nothing. Kathleen Wynne made a big deal about closi ng two provincial coal plants, at enormous cost, while China continues to build hundreds annually.

It is unimaginable that Chinese megaproject s would be held up — at least for too long — by protesters. We might then think that this week’s scenes in Montreal are to be celebrated as a welcome display of free speech, but it was the opposite: a determination to silence all opposing points of view. For the kind of people who want to shut down the Canadian fossil fuel industry, totalitarianism is not the enemy, it is the model.

Almost three years ago, Trudeau enthused about how Chinese dictatorship made it easier to pursue climate goals. The remark may have been off the cuff, but it represented a conviction that he would have absorbed at his father’s knee. Pierre Trudeau was a longtime Communist sympathizer who, like all Fellow Travellers, found it easy to ignore state murder and oppression. It was the same arrogant mindset that led to an economic assault on Alberta in the form of the 1980 National Energy Program.

Fossil-fuelled capitalism remains the enemy, it’s just the rationale for the assault that has changed. In the NEP era it was the alleged threat of foreign — that is, American — control of Canadian resources, and of Alberta having “more than its fair share” of Canada’s petroleum patrimony. Now it is the alleged existential threat of greenhouse gases. The guilty parties are the same, as is the policy solution: more state direction of economic activity.

State control has never gone out of fashion in China, but the country’s enormous success is due to unleashing the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, that success has enabled the recrudescence of imperial ambitions.

Meanwhile, Chinese economic interests and those of “Junior Trudeau” are hardly consistent. The Chinese are upset that the tens of billions of dollars they have poured into the Alberta oilpatch are showing significant losses, not just because of low prices but because Alberta oil is being blocked by the forces that closed down the Montreal hearings. The same anti- development groups have stood against West Coast LNG plants. That LNG could have replaced Chinese coal and thus addressed real environmental problems.

There are other ways in which the Chinese agenda is at odds with Trudeau’s climate obsessions. The prime minister said on Wednesday that Canada might join the Asian Infrastructure Bank, a Chinese- led rival to the U. S.- controlled World Bank. Insofar as the World Bank has become a tool for imposing expensive and unreliable alternative energy on poor countries, an alternative that is prepared to fund fossilfuel projects is much to be desired. How that fits with the Canadian government’s climate posturing isn’t entirely clear.

The Harper government adopted a pragmatic — that is, deliberately vague — policy toward further takeovers by Chinese state-owned enterprises, or SOEs. It has been suggested that Trudeau might relax those rules this week as a goodwill gesture, but one doubts there are too many SOEs interested in pouring more money into the oilsands. What China wants, which is entirely reasonable, is for roadblocks to new pipelines to be removed. By contrast, everything the Trudeau government has done so far serves to reinforce those roadblocks. That beefy brawler in Montreal was really just part of the program.

FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO KILL THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY, CHINA’S REGIME ISN’T THE ENEMY; IT’S THE MODEL.