‘JOINING THE CONVERSATION’ HAS BECOME THE SIREN CALL OF THE LOQUACIOUS LOOTER

Joining the conversation all too often means an invitation to step into a social-media echo chamber. The concept is most enthusiastically promoted by professional conversationalists, who are only looking for input on how better to promote their agenda. Not “Should we do this?” but “How should we do this?” Not “Should we have a calorie policy, or a climate policy, or an innovation policy?” but “What sort of calorie, climate or innovation policies should we have?” “What sort of Big Government do we want?”

Meanwhile if politicians don’t like the way the conversation is going — say over something like the Ontario gas-plant scandal — then they seek to “change the conversation.” Prime Minister Trudeau even declared that there can be no conversation on pipelines in the Great Bear Rainforest.

On the bright side, the citizenry does sometimes seek to blow up the one-way conversation, as in the cases of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but this tends to make the conversationalists very angry. They start condemning xenophobes and deplorables, people with whom you just can’t have a conversation.

I came across a prime example of bogus political conversation the other day in something called “The Citizen Dialogues on Canada’s Energy Future.” Recently convened by Simon Fraser University’s (SFU’s) Centre for Dialogue and Forum Research, it involves selecting 150 citizens to “sit down to hear about one another’s values and how they relate to energy.” It all starts with “laying all the information on the table,” because too much of what we read is apparently “cherry picked.”

SFU has provided the random-yet-representative 150 with a “discussion guide” that “surfaces multiple perspectives without censorship.” For example, “GHG emissions mean that the energy sector is a major contributor to climate change.” But surely that is a moot point, not least since the guide also admits that the Canadian economy produces only 2 per cent of global emissions. I wonder if the facilitators will be eager to discuss the uncertainty of climate science without censorship.

According to SFU’s Robin Prest, “There’s too much at stake and Canada’s people, diverse regions and industries are too interdependent for us to continue to shout at one another indefinitely.”

But who is shouting, apart from those who want to close down the oilsands, fracking and pipelines? Social media is great for assembling mobs, but those mobs usually aren’t too interested in having a chat. Meanwhile those in the business community who have been seeking “social licence” through dialogue have merely legitimized their opponents’ intransigence.

The SFU exercise is funded by the federal Department of Natural Resources. To the extent that the 150 reflect what the government thinks already, their views will be sombrely regurgitated at a forum in Winnipeg next month. To the extent that they don’t, they are talking into the wind.

The Citizen Dialogues are a part of Natural Resource Canada’s broader Generation Energy project. Its trite motto is “Moving Canada Forward.” Any suggestion that federal policy might be moving Canada backwards is not up for discussion. After all, there is a world to save. The transition to a low-carbon economy is a job creator. You think otherwise? Shut up.