GREENMAIL THOUGHT TRIAGE.

WILLIAM WATSON

Your house is on fire. The fire department is slow to respond but does finally arrive. But then the guy driving the truck comes over to tell you that before they can start unloading their ladders and hooking up their hoses there’s a little something you need to sign: a petition supporting the mayor’s urban development plan. If you don’t sign, they’ll keep the fire from spreading to any neighbour’s house but won’t save yours. What do you do? You sign, of course, but as you do, you resolve never, ever to vote for that S.O.B. mayor or his party again.

That’s not greatly different from what the federal government is doing with its cutely titled LEEFF — for “large employer emergency financing facility” — which is pronounced “leaf,” as in turn over a new one. Given its ideological requirements, however, it should really be named “LEEFFTT” — for “large employer emergency financing facility thought-triage.” To obtain a loan your firm may desperately need in order to survive this no-growth spring you need to sign on to the government’s environmental agenda by committing “to publish annual climate-related disclosure reports consistent with the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, including how (your) future operations will support environmental sustainability and national climate goals.”

Business firms, like all of us, should obey environmental sustainability laws, as well as national (and subnational) climate laws and if they don’t, they should face whatever legal sanctions are in place. But now, like good North Koreans, they’ll also have to show how fervently they support national goals? As defined how and by whom, exactly? And if they aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic, they don’t get the money? And therefore maybe don’t continue in business?

Using a once-in-a-century national emergency to require companies to swear fealty to favoured policies would be sneaky, slimy and sleazy enough if a majority government tried it. But here’s a government that in an election just seven months ago came second in the popular vote, in fact has the

USING A ONCE-IN-A-CENTURY

NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO REQUIRE COMPANIES TO SWEAR FEALTY TO FAVOURED POLICIES WOULD BE SNEAKY, SLIMY

AND SLEAZY ENOUGH.

lowest popular vote of any government in Canadian history, didn’t even get one-third of Canadians to vote for it (only 33.12 per cent), lost 20 seats in the House of Commons and is a dozen seats short of a majority. Policies that it couldn’t persuade voters during the election were a good idea it is now enforcing by threatening to withhold financial life support from companies in real danger of expiring.

This isn’t exactly greenmail: the government doesn’t have information about companies that it will expose if they don’t pay up. It’s closer to the dictionary definition of extortion: “the practice of obtaining something through force or threats.” It’s a technique this government has used before. You don’t agree with free abortion on demand all the way to birth? So sad, too bad: no summer-job funding for your organization.

As you knew he would, in introducing the LEEFF Finance Minister Bill Morneau reassured Canadians that “our government has (their) backs.” Maybe I’ve been reading too many 1940s murder mysteries during lockdown but now when I hear that phrase I think of the hero suddenly feeling the cold steel muzzle of a handgun poking his ribs. Mr. Morneau may have our backs now. Given how he’s piling up debt, he’ll soon have the rest of us, too, for as far down the road as anyone can see.

We’re in the middle of a serious emergency. True statesmen and -women would declare a truce in society’s permanent — and essentially healthy — ideological debate about how to organize itself. It’s not uncommon, after all, that countries going to war form governments of national unity. They then do whatever’s necessary to get through the emergency, often with virtual unanimity about what “necessary” means. Only after the emergency is over do they return to politics and ideology as usual. By signing on to unprecedented increases in spending to help people and businesses make it through the lockdown, the Canadian right, such as it is, has followed through on its side of that implicit bargain, endorsing increases in deficits and debt that in normal times would be anathema to it.

But the left side of the spectrum seems to be operating by the rule that any crisis that furnishes an opening for advancing its ideological agenda is an awful thing to waste. Instead of making vital financial assistance conditional only on normal fiduciary considerations and a promise to repay, the government is trying hard to shape the post-pandemic future to its liking. Forget that. Let’s get through the pandemic and then debate the future.

We on the right are often accused of tolerating, even fostering, greed and expedience in personal and public affairs. That is bunk but it is bunk you hear a lot. Perhaps the one consolation in the government’s LEEFF power play is the clarity with which it reveals how comfortable the left is with cynically, even cruelly, exploiting people’s — in this case business people’s — vulnerabilities in order to achieve its ends.

When the emergency is over Canadians will judge who was a patriot and who an opportunist.