National Post (National Edition)
Canada must stop this self-destruction Genuine workers forgotten
Canada must stop this self-destruction
It has always been true that a country is most secure when its functioning is least contingent on external sources. To the degree that it is possible, to provide for itself all which is necessary for that functioning, is an undebatable proposition.
It’s as old as the fine axiom of “stand on your own two feet.” Others’ limbs will not support you when it most matters. But here in Canada we have displaced that idea, shackled those industries central to the country’s capacity to own itself. And we have neglected and even disparaged the most central enterprises, diminished the respect for enterprise itself, leaving us open and vulnerable to factors over which we have no influence.
Canada has almost all it needs. But the country, or more properly its government, has disconnected from priority concerns to become preoccupied with issues over which it has no real influence. Drop the nonsense preoccupations that distract or supersede from our real interests, for example, that seat on the UN’s useless security council, and drop specifically this idle idea that we can change the planet’s climate in 2100.
As said, we are providentially supplied with massive natural resources. Yet, we have hamstrung the most fundamental of our industries, put it under the most specious of restraints, collapsed a central sector, one absolutely vital to a modern economy. The energy industry has been made a pariah, and mining next to energy, absent both of which the world cannot function. The fact that the bountiful resources of a whole province are landlocked is and has been a true national scandal. It defies reason itself.
The stability of our economy should not be shackled to the noxious policies of Russia and Saudi Arabia, nor should the thousands of workers in the energy and mining sectors be cast aside for the delusive and worrisome ambitions of international and national pressure groups organized around global warming. Our economy, post-COVID-19, will need to run on every cylinder, and after years of undermining these central industries, we will painfully taste the harvest of this lunatic obsession.
It is also repellent — though I will save this for a future column — that global warming zealots are aligning the pandemic with their obsessional cause, suggesting outright that the shutdown of the world’s economies, (“degrowth” is now a catchword in their bulletins) should be seen as a model for fighting, as they term it, dreaded climate change.
Environmentalism is a detractive enterprise. It is a self-wound to the idea of national self-sufficiency.
For the most pertinent illustration of this we have the April 1 decision to raise the carbon tax. What in the world is this government thinking imposing a fresh tax on fuel in the middle of an economic and health crisis? Our entire economy is nearly in paralysis, hundreds of thousands, even millions of Canadians are under the whip of economic devastation, the country is going into massive debt.
Who with the wit of a stone or a heap of moss thinks this is the time for a new tax on a necessity? Who thinks that raising the price of gasoline for the truckers who keep the supermarkets stocked, kerosene for farmers who are coping with a wet harvest, or fuel for any business that happens to still be trying to operate, is an idea whose time has come?
The first step to real self-sufficiency is to get off the treadmill of what John Kenneth Galbraith called “conventional wisdom.” To get to self-sufficiency, go first to our farmers, elevate their concerns and voices in our national councils. I am so pleased to have met or talked to so many of them during the past few years.
OTHERS’ LIMBS WILL NOT SUPPORT YOU WHEN IT MOST MATTERS
Wives and husbands, small farmers and big, and a more pleasant and admirable people I do not know. They have been perpetually in a bind, perpetually the last in line for news stories (a pronoun fool will get more time on the National than a small farmer worried about the carbon tax) and the most reluctant to ask for help. This element of reticence in so sturdy a people, as so violently in contrast to shallow social justice warriors. Their dignified reluctance to whine, marks them as adults, people who have faced real challenges but even in the hardest of times guard their dignity. But did anyone, before this crisis, listen to them?
Of course not. Bring on the carbon tax. Let’s find some new way to make things harder for those who are producing the most essential element in human life: food. Has the Sierra Club plans we haven’t yet heard of for filling the grocery shelves of Canada during COVID-19?
In the complacency of our long uninterrupted prosperity we have forgotten, and in some cases, demeaned the people and activities that secured that prosperity, those essential activities and industries that have enabled the great balance of the Canadian way. Those who have dirty faces and grimy hands after a day’s work are the spine of the rest of us’s comforts. And elements of the “better” classes have been and are demeaning them, and remain ignorantly unaware that their petty status depends on those who do what I regard as genuine work.
The central systems and programs of Canada are intimately related to the best economy the nation can provide. We must repel any ideology or external cause that advocates injuring the country’s economy as a worthy, even necessary goal.
A country is the willingly compliant and co-operative project of its citizens, always attendant to the welfare of its own citizens as its commanding priority. Diversion from that goal is false and enervating show-politics. It usually is the fruit of those who have never tasted the biweekly or monthly cheque as their lifeline, or held a tenuous employment in whatever they do.
They mistake their own exemption from economic precariousness for the natural state of everyone else. This is the idiocy of self-absorption. It is also a deeper ignorance: the wage earners keep the rest of society moving. From plumber to oil worker, to the man who cleans the gutters, the unheralded are, along with our professionals in health and other areas, the most necessary among us. Self-sufficiency means recognizing this and supporting them.
Take care first of your own citizens, which means limiting the contingencies of external dependence. Provide those citizens with what can best be hoped for in security of food, technology, energy and a functioning economy — and then in times of crisis such as we are now experiencing we will at least have the strongest shield possible for our collective well-being.