Liberal green agenda needs bit of humility

Before the Ottawa Santa Claus parade got underway on Saturday, Liberal cabinet minister and downtown Ottawa’s local MP Catherine McKenna posted to social media:

“It’s starting to snow just in time for the parade! As the Minister responsible for weather, I’m either a hero or a zero . . . depends how you feel about winter.”

The strange post caught observers off guard.

“Pretty sure Canada does not have a Minister of Weather,” Conservative Senator Linda Frum remarked.

McKenna’s actual title is minister of environment and climate change — a new, activist label. From 1979 until 2015 it was simply minister of environment.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau changed the post’s name when he got into office to signal his passion for the green agenda.

While it’s clear McKenna was joking about being a hero for sprinkling Ottawa’s Bank Street with snow, it’s unclear whether she understood how odd it was to be rolling weather into her ministerial domain.

“Even her jokes run counter to the proper functioning of her office,” Postmedia columnist Lorrie Goldstein wrote. “She should be explaining that weather is not climate and climate is not weather.”

Regardless of what McKenna was getting at, there’s been a tone to her repeated virtue-signalling on this file that lacks humility.

This was echoed in her recent choice of Halloween costume: donning a green “climate crusader” super hero outfit.

While Trudeau, McKenna and other government officials are jet-setting about the global cocktail circuit discussing, among other items, ways to phase out coal — as was the focus of McKenna’s recent COP23 visit — back home there is a real human cost to this agenda.

Shortly after entering office, the Liberals announced the doubling to $2.5 billion of the amount of taxpayer money being sent abroad into the United Nations climate coffers. This money comes from the pockets of the hardworking people McKenna and Trudeau serve, but that’s rarely acknowledged.

Meanwhile, people in Ontario are pushed into energy poverty by the province’s green agenda — which McKenna and Trudeau seem keen to replicate nationally.

All this to pursue federal targets that everyone knows we won’t meet.

It’s one thing to approach climate change as an earnest public policy discussion. But the Liberals current angle, with its in-yourface theatrics, needs more humility.