National Post (National Edition)
High-wire act
TRUDEAU’S DESIRE FOR PRAISE COMES AT THE PRICE OF JOBS
“I f we don’t convince the world that we have our act together, as a country, on the environment, we will find it harder and harder to get our resources to world markets.”
That was Justin Trudeau, during a 2013 speech in Calgary. Well, here in 2018, how together is “our” act on the environment?
Currently B.C. and Alberta are staring out at each other over the ramparts on global warming. The Trans Mountain pipeline is the causus belli, but global warming, i.e., what is really meant by “the environment” these days, is what the strife in Canada is, and has been for quite a while, all about.
Whatever it does for the Earth, global warming raises the temperature in politics. Take the ardent catastrophist Naomi Klein for instance. Her view of it is as the hell mouth to “injustice, racism, intolerance and wars,” a tidy quartet. On Canada’s much abjured Kinder Morgan pipeline, Klein is only a little less fretful. She speaks of that, among other drear indictments, as having the potential to “cook the planet.” A sense of proportion is clearly not a dominant virtue when global warming is your cause. Her views are the views of the movement. She is a leading antagonist in the global warming war.
In that war the Canadian oilsands has been the main front for over a decade. It has been the object of the world’s environmentalists’ most sustained crusade. It will not take a Jeopardy sage to guess which national government has been most avidly the champion of the cause. The Trudeau government, with its acute ambition to be seen as the whitest of the white knights in the combat against the Great Warming to come, its patent yearning to be seen as a, or the, major player in the great cause, has made the fight against what it calls climate change its most public and urgent endeavour. Global warming has, for all intents, replaced peacekeeping as Canada’s bid for global stature.
In doing so, it has recklessly enriched the atmosphere in which the campaigns against Canadian oil are conducted, and equally — until very recent days — has been passive to the point of prostration to all the propaganda incessantly targeting Canadian jobs and Canadian industry in the oilfields.
It effectively cancelled Energy East, banned future tanker traffic, cancelled Northern Gateway, hosted innumerable summits on fighting climate change, instituted a national carbon tax, strong-armed Alberta into an illusory deal for “social licence,” silently wrote off thousands and thousands of jobs in the process, and famously lamented not being able to close down the “carbon economy tomorrow.” All to earn credits with the internationalist global warming consensus.
Those campaigns for the moment meet and are most intense in British Columbia. The one pipeline left on the Canadian drawing board now has for years been hectored and harassed, subject to protest and serpentine regulation, and dragged to near extinction. In fewer than two weeks we will hear whether Kinder Morgan, which has spent one billion dollars merely to extend a pipeline built in 1953, has tired of the exercise and, exhausted, simply abandons the project out of bottomless frustration. They must really wonder why, with so little welcome, and up until their deadline, they faced a federal government so committed to a cause whose triumph would be the negation of all energy industries, anywhere.
Back to getting our act together. The federal government is also on the ramparts facing the B.C. government, with Finance Minister Bill Morneau levelling a caustic fusillade this week at B.C. Premier John Horgan and his green cohorts for obstructing the national purpose and “unconstitutionally” seeking to override federal authority. The federal government is not quite as hot over Saskatchewan’s demurral to play into its global warming policy of the carbon tax, but it has already singled out Saskatchewan for financial penalties, withholding federal funds from that province — a tactic it will not deploy, however, against the far more contentious B.C. This fuels a legitimate charge that the Trudeau Liberals play the game unfairly as between provinces, and thereby manufactures a fresh friction within our newly fractious federation. Meantime Quebec, never a spectator on this file, is on side with B.C., as it was active in killing the Energy East pipeline and therefore actively in contest with Alberta, and latently with the Atlantic region. Global warming is not a buttress of national unity.
But the rampage stirred up by greenism does not stop there. In Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, in every other sense a capable and intelligent leader, by adopting the global warming cause and making it an Ontario project, has utterly exhausted her popularity. The various results of the woeful “green” efforts — waste, artful subsidies to renewables, cancellation of gas plants, a forest of overpriced windmills, the dread carbon tax, and tumid electricity prices — have blistered her apparently irredeemably with the voters, and polls suggest has turned her party into political pariahs. The only person truly happy about Ontario’s green policies has to be Doug Ford.
Within our Indigenous communities division is rife. Those which signed on to Kinder Morgan plead to be heard and are either never mentioned in all the volatile press on the subject, or vastly overwhelmed by the Indigenous activists, who in most reporting on this subject earn the headlines and the lead story.
In the Atlantic region Newfoundland is waking up to the consideration that its offshore industry will probably be the next target of the global warming zealots. The Maritimes are waking up, too, that they let pass the cancellation of Energy East with reckless unconcern. The economy of the region will pay for that indifference, and the current perfect cloud of 32 Liberal MPs will pay for it too.
The Trudeau government vastly overestimates and overpraises the power of “our example to the world.” This is quite natural. Every author is the ideal reviewer of his own book. But to earn even that dubious international status, look at the costs at home. Canada’s carbon tax, and its high zeal for the cause, cannot, in any substantial way, change the equations of the world’s atmosphere. We are incidental to the problem, if indeed it is a problem. Whatever Canada does, or does not do, will not accelerate the crisis or diminish it, in any way that is meaningful.
In its zeal to be seen as champion for a problem we have minimal capacity to cure, this government has roiled the Canadian political landscape, stirred a current of rage in Alberta, set provinces bitterly at odds with each other, shattered the governing party in Ontario, placed useless taxes on an already depressed industry, and chased billions of dollars of investment money out of the country. Most grievously, it has already indicated to the world that Canada is a very inhospitable place for any projects large in scale that in any way might wander under the eyes and objections of global warming zealots, the politicians who support them, and governments that are their willing partners.
The world has indeed already taken notice that Canada doesn’t have its “act together” and Canada has already learned that it is “getting harder and harder to get its resources to world markets.” It is certainly true of the most cardinal resource of global commerce, our oil.
What a mess playing boy scout on global warming has created in our quiet Dominion.