Liberal presumptions go up in smog

The federal Liberals seem to be encountering a bit of a reality thing these days. It turned out to be easier to make promises on the campaign trail than keep them once elected, and on matters from Syrian refugees to the budget, they are having to admit they didn’t really think things through. Which makes smog in Beijing especially worrying.

If the connection is not immediately apparent, it might just be obscured by the particulate haze that forced Chinese officials to issue a “red alert,” close factories and schools and force cars off the road. Or it might be obscured by blithe disregard for actual evidence, and logic, by people who make a sanctimonious fetish of “evidence- based decision making.”

The prime culprit here is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Two years ago at a “ladies’ night” fundraiser, in one of many flip utterances t hat might have derailed him against more persuasive opponents in the last election, he expressed “a level of admiration” for the Chinese dictatorship. It would have been bad enough in isolation. But the reason he gave was that “their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green, we need to start, you know, investing in solar. There is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about: having a dictatorship where you can do whatever you wanted.”

It is not obvious that former prime minister Stephen Harper dreamed of having a dictatorship. But it is obvious that Trudeau had no idea how the Chinese economy worked, or didn’t, especially with regard to its horrendous environmental record. Dictatorships, to spell it out in crayon, do not have to listen to their citizens. They can do bad things, like destroying the environment to pursue “growth,” without regard for the opinions or real needs of their people. That’s what dictatorship means, and it’s why serious people do not admire dictatorships.

At the moment China’s ghastly environmental performance is a problem for the Trudeau Liberals with specific reference to their high- profile, if ill- considered, promise t o do something about global man-made emissions of greenhouse gases ( GHGs). The People’s Republic of China is belching out GHGs, as well as more conventional pollutants, at a record pace, far above that of the United States, 14 times our own (probably more, as dictatorships also lie a lot) and rising fast. But it is a far larger problem for people bringing a surprisingly limited tool kit to the urgent task of rethinking a bunch of appealing but unrealistic promises.

Our new prime minister in particular seems to have very little idea what is going on in the world or how things work. The fact that China’s dictatorship had not turned their economy on a dime environmentally, even if it could have seen one through the killer smog, was not exactly a state secret.

Not even in China, though the state news agency did respond to the latest choking pollution cloud over much of northern China by publishing undated photos of clean air. And certainly not in the free world, including Canada, where it has been all over the newspapers, which, one trusts, an aspiring prime minister takes time to read.

Trudeau’s apparent inability to grasp that dictatorships are not efficient in their methods, benign in their goals or responsive to public priorities raises the disturbing question of what else he doesn’t know. And in the immortal words of Yes Minister’s arch- bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby, “it could be almost anything.”

He didn’t know the Harper Tories were distorting their budget projections during the election campaign, surely among the most obvious facts about the whole fiscal debate. He didn’t know his tax hike on the rich wouldn’t pay for his tax cut for the middle class. He didn’t know budgets don’t balance themselves. He didn’t know how to implement his promises on aboriginal affairs or what exactly they were. He didn’t know he couldn’t bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end at all, let alone safely.

The Liberals are now up a stump because of the things they said while on it. They risk retreating piecemeal from their various ambitious commitments in political and intellectual disarray. To avoid such a fate, they need to do more than recognize that their promises are crumbling one by one. They need to grasp that they had given far too little thought to how public affairs works generally, including the tendency of ambitious politicians to make ill-considered pledges.

It is very hard to study these things in office because you are extremely busy, buffeted by events and frequently boxed in by prior commitments articulated far more precisely t han t hey were thought through. The Liberals would have been wise to think about fundamentals, and details, before running for office on a lavishly unstudied platform. It is essential that they do so now that the platform is collapsing beneath their feet.

Lesson One: China is badly polluted because it is a dictatorship, not despite being one.

Does our environmentally conscious prime minister still admire China its dictatorship?