ALBERTA GETS INCONVENIENT. LIBIN

Al Gore’s sequel to his 2006 climate- disaster film, An Inconvenient Truth, opens this week, but conservatives in Alberta just spoiled the ending for everyone.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power was already off to a rocky start. In a summer chockablock with epic blockbusters, a documentary sequel to a PowerPoint presentation looked like a box-office long shot to say the least, especially one centred around someone whose political career peaked before today’s teens were born. Then came news last month that the distributor, Paramount, which had originally planned Gore’s film for wide release, was paring that back to limited release in select cities. And the advance reviews of the film from those who have seen it, well, they would seem to offer some idea why.

But the recent political earthquakes that have cracked the foundations of the global climate crusade provide the more glaring signs of trouble. That would include the big one in Alberta this past weekend, where two major parties agreed to merge, driven every bit as much by fierce opposition to the carbon-condemning agenda of the current NDP government as by Premier Rachel Notley’s fiscal recklessness. Members of the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose party proved so fervent to team up against NDP policies that referendums in both parties won more than 95 per cent support.

Until Saturday’s stunning results, even those deep inside the merger drive worried the vote wouldn’t clear the threshold of 75 per cent support that the Wildrose constitution required (the PCs needed only a simple majority). Getting both parties within a few points of unanimity makes it clear that right-leaning Albertans have no greater priority than putting a stop at one-term an unlikely Notley government made possible by vote splitting between the PCs and Wildrose, whose combined vote in the 2015 provincial election easily outstripped the NDP.

That was in an election when the NDP mentioned no plans for a carbon tax, which it has now rolled out to widely unpopular support. Polls show roughly two-thirds of Albertans disapprove of it, and aren’t buying Notley’s dubious, masochistic spin that taxing Albertans gets new pipelines built. Maybe that’s because while Albertans are feeling the tax pain, yet another pipeline, Northern Gateway, recently fell victim to pipeline politics and Trans Mountain still faces a new B.C. government intent on blocking it.

So, when Brian Jean, the Wildrose leader and a candidate to lead the new united party, got up to speak after results rolled in Saturday, one of his big applause lines was a shot at the heart of Notley’s carbon penalty: “We will rip up the carbon tax — and that’s gonna be a lot of fun,” he said to cheers. “Together, we will send a message to all of Canada that Alberta is not apologizing for our industries or our way of life.”

In his own speech, PC leader Jason Kenney, also running to head the new unity party, called out for workers, nurses or anyone unhappy with the carbon tax to “join us.” When he arrived on the provincial political scene last summer announcing a plan to run for the Alberta PC leadership — and to unite the province’s right — Kenney brought with him a reputation as Canada’s fiercest carbon- tax killer. While in cabinet in the Conservative government, he had been its most effective attack dog in shredding the “Green Shift” carbon-tax election platform being championed by then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. Kenney called it “discredited, old, beggar-thy-neighbour class-warfare politics” that would “destroy jobs” and make everyone’s lives more expensive, with no real environmental difference. Dion’s Liberals were clobbered over it in the 2008 election. Now he’s coming for Notley.

That Albertans in the only two real parties that aren’t NDP are so driven to roll back not just the tax, but so many other anti- carbon policies enacted by the NDP, reveals just how unconvinced so many average people are that punishing themselves and their economy will make the world a better place. An Angus Reid poll last month also showed a majority of Canadians now want to stop the federal Liberals’ plan to impose a countrywide carbon tax, a policy also unmentioned in the Liberals’ election platform. No Canadian party since Dion’s Liberal has dared campaign for a carbon tax because Canadians have never elected a party promising one.

That’s just how wobbly the carbon- control crusade has become in Canada. It looks just as weak in the U. S. after Americans elected Donald Trump president on a promise to end Washington’s war on fossil fuels and pull out of the Paris climate agreement ( done and done). The pro- Paris alarmists have yet to give up their apocalyptic prophecies, but they enjoy far less credibility than they had in 2006. The catastrophic predictions Gore made in his film 11 years ago have hardly aged well, with so many of his dark prophecies of what would have happened by now not actually having happened, but that isn’t stopping him from serving up a whole new bunch of terrifying visions of doom in this new one.

Perhaps that’s why critics have been so unimpressed. More than one suggests that Gore comes across in the picture far too convinced now of his own momentousness, comparing his struggle to the civil rights movement and abolitionism. One disappointed reviewer writes that An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power “plays out like a tragic superhero film (where) Gore is depicted as a one- man army, fighting the good fight against impossible odds” but inadvertently reveals a depressing portrait of an ex- politician who is now “deeply and tragically alone.” That the truth to power being spoken by voters to self-appointed, cape-less climate crusaders like him, Rachel Notley and Liberal green-shifters is that we’d rather they didn’t rescue us, thanks, looks like the real, inconvenient sequel to Gore’s tired preachiness.

THIS IS HOW WOBBLY THE CARBON-CONTROL CRUSADE HAS BECOME.