Dear Justin: Eat us last

The other day, a motley group of 60 business and “civil society” leaders signed an open letter calling on the prime minister and the premiers to impose “smart” climate policies on the way to that allegedly inevitable “lowcarbon world.” The letter read like a Liberal policy document because, essentially, it was. Bizarrely, it made no reference to the election of Donald Trump.

The letter received little coverage in the media, but on Thursday Friends of Science, the small but feisty Calgarybased group of climate skeptics, challenged its claims, noting — with substantial background documentation — that it flew in the face of reality, even without taking into account that Trump’s likely rejection of carbon pricing would make the recommended “smart” Canadian moves look distinctly dumb.

The more glaring issue, however, is why a group of senior executives, many from the oil industry, plus other business representative bigwigs, such as John Manley, head of the Business Council of Canada, would be joining some of industry’s most rabid environmental NGO opponents in effectively begging the government to hobble the economy?

The answer seems to be something along the lines of the Stockholm Syndrome: that phenomenon where kidnap victims begin to sympathize, or at least mouth sympathy, with their captors.

In his excellent takedown this week of Justin Trudeau’s much-, and rightly, ridiculed remarks on the death of Fidel Castro, the Post’s Michael Den Tandt invoked the syndrome to explain the ostensible “love” of the Cuban people for their oppressor.

Of course Canada is not a dictatorship. The ENGOs have no legitimate political authority. So how have they persuaded executives to mouth enthusiasm for suicidal policies? Simple: by “market campaigns” of disinformation designed to destroy or threaten their businesses.

Smart Signatory Steve Williams, head of oil giant Suncor, knows very well about the Tar Sands Campaign of misinformation masterminded by fellow signatory Tzeporah Berman and her cohorts. Berman is the sometime Greenpeacenik who has made a career of successfully bullying business, and whose reward for marketplace thuggery has been to be appointed co- chair of the Alberta commission on the future of the oilsands, even though she has clearly stated that they should be closed down.

A few years ago, storm troopers from the Rainforest Action Network, with which Berman also has close links, harassed the wife of Gord Nixon, then CEO of the Royal Bank, to bring the bank into environmental line. So RBC signatory John Stackhouse knows all about the morality of those with whom he is now buddies.

Another signatory, Annette Verschuren, is a former head of Home Depot Canada. She was there when Home Depot was being viciously targeted by Berman’s cohorts during the “war in the woods” in B.C. in the 1990s. That war led to the creation of the donation- oriented Great Bear Rainforest, which is the reason the Northern Gateway pipeline was turned down this week by the Liberal government. That decision further confirms the enormous success of the radical environmental movement in moulding public policy.

Justin Trudeau was pilloried for his sycophancy regarding Castro, and has been criticized for being, like his father, a fan of authoritarianism, but the current green version is much less socialism than eco- fascism ( although the two have much in common).

Now government ownership and direct control are downplayed. “Co-ordination” and “co-operation” are all the rage. Business is permitted to exist as a “partner” as long as it toes the sustainable line. It persuades itself that it has to support bad government policy for fear of something worse.

Most egregiously, it throws up Useful Idiots — perhaps victims of that Scandinavian syndrome — who really seem to believe the subversive Pablum they are spouting, or who sign on the dotted line out of fear, or misguided “pragmatism,” or in the hope that they might be eaten last.

The fact that the letter was begging the Liberal government to do what the government wants to do anyway should have aroused suspicions.

Why would Dominic Barton, that terminal pedlar of conventional sustainable wisdom, be signing an open letter to a government of whose economic advisory council he is the head?

Why are these bigwigs joining their rabid opponents in begging Ottawa to hobble the economy?

Central to this exercise was the shepherd of these corporate sheep, an organization called Smart Prosperity. Smart Prosperity is the successor to Sustainable Prosperity, which was set up as an instrument of Liberal policy under former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, perpetrator of the most damaging and pointless climate regime in Canada.

When Sustainable Prosperity was morphing into Smart Prosperity last March, the most enthusiastic celebrant at the announcement — at the Globe conference of green Fellow Travellers in Vancouver — was ... Justin Trudeau.

Smart Prosperity is run by environmental warhorse Stewart Elgie, a professor at the University of Ottawa who is also a big noise at another fake “independent” organization created to support Liberal/global climate policy: the Ecofiscal Commission. Another signatory, Greg Kiessling — founder of Bullfrog Power, the company that caters to Ontarians who don’t think they are paying enough for their electricity — is behind yet another fake “market- oriented” think tank, Clean Prosperity, which is also pushing for carbon taxes.

Fidel Castro preached “Socialism or Death.” The sign on the barn door now reads “Ecofascism or Armageddon.” Underneath are the signatures of Canada’s most prominent Useful Idiots and their ENGO captors. Moreover, they seem to think that if they ignore Donald Trump, he might go away.