No pain, no gain for Ontarians

It cannot have escaped the attention of many that Ontario is most unsettled these days. That its industries are anxious, its debt colossal, its citizens not in a pleasant mood. Ontario is in a lot of pain. But let me assure readers outside Ontario that it has not all been for nothing. There are rewards. They are subtle, intangible, but they are real. Let me explain.

Those who share the faith and endorse the morality of global warming derive very much the same satisfactions that attended fidelity to the less demanding dogmas of earlier and less ambitious creeds. The carbon regime, tax hikes on gasoline, failed or failing long- term contracts, fear and trembling in the manufacturing sector, the gnashing of teeth in poorer ( and now colder) households, Ontario Hydro’s ever- swelling levies, the despoliation of rural vistas by towers of whirling, bird-bashing windmills: These, each in itself, and all in combination are the acknowledged costs of the Great Greening.

Those outside the faith, and mere loitering agnostics, see nothing here but a catalogue of burdens. Shackles of an alien god. But to those within the covenant, they are the way stations on the hard and stony path to delicious rewards reserved for the elect. This is the true chemistry of belief. What appear as obstacles to heretics, appear to believers as smooth escalators to a higher state. Accepting, embracing what must be done supplies them with a sense of inner sanction, endows them with that peace of mind which a lesser scripture records, rather churlishly, as passing all understanding.

It has always been thus. Think of those Lenten pilgrims of old scuttling from hamlets all over Europe to visit Jerusalem for a glance at the bone splinters of some of the l esser saints. The “ways deep and the weather sharp” but the end transmuted the journey into something sweet and fine. So it is now.

I see the mages of Queen’s Park, shivering in the polls, stripped of their popularity, the scorn of so many who once strew palms on University Avenue at their approach, I see them now embracing all that misery. For the cause is just and the cost therefore simply cannot be too high. What is a blizzard of swollen light bills and a hash of inflated power contracts to them? For is it not their pride to have done their bit to defer an apocalypse?

And so, if they raise their eyes and see that last year carbon dioxide molecules were, say, 387 parts per million in the atmosphere of our planet, and now — as a mere cost of billions and utter depression in their electoral prospects, it is, say, 386 or even 385 parts per million — Ontario, they cry, has done its bit. A bit, after all, being all that Ontario can do.

What other gains for all that pain? There is the near-irresistible rapture of those who lead a government casting it as a moral exemplar. In the early days of the faith the apostle Dalton made no pretence that Ontario’s actions could in any way truly alter the balance of the earth and atmosphere. If this world was heading toward a sweltering finale Ontario alone, whatever it could do, would not save it. But that was never the thought. The burdens taken on so gloriously by the green clerics of Queen’s Park were not meant for effect. They were example only.

In his familiar Lincolnesque manner McGuinty promoted the Green Plan as “placing Ontario in the forefront as a leader in the fight against global warming.” Ms. Wynne, as faithful to the doctrine of the founder, works out of the same catechism. Ontario is merely, and this is no small merely, leading the way. Ontario’s example shall — would I could find a happier verb — fire the planet. Energy policy as moral contagion sums it up.

The dream was, I suppose, that the Kazakhstanis, and Burundians, the Chinese and Peruvians, all in their several dominions, taking the morning beverage to begin the day, would pause and remark to the neighbours, “Those Ontarians. They’re leading the fight against global warming. What a people.” Then, instantly, a worldwide flight to turn off the space heaters, shut down the factories, jail the coal miners, and turn out the lights. In 24 hours the only place left on the planet that still had the lights on would be a mansion in Tennessee.

Because as we know, when Ontario sets the pace, the world follows.

I suppose this to be the kind of conversation Ms. Wynne and Mr. McGuinty designed Ontario’s energy policy to provoke, in the McGuinty case burning a billion dollars just to shut down a gas plant to ensure.

So was all the pain worth it? Mr. Trudeau thinks so. For he has the same plan. And some of the same planners. So far, though, that’s the whole parade.

OBSTACLES (ARE) SMOOTH ESCALATORS TO A HIGHER STATE.