PM is Captain Canada to threatened steel workers, but oil’s another story
Steel and oil. Strength and energy. The world is built on both. They are both major Canadian industries. Steel. President Donald Trump hints or bluffs of tariffs on steel (and then defers it) and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delays a vacation (DEFCON 1 at Sussex Drive) to do a reassurance tour of Canada’s steel cities. He’s “got their backs,” he tells steel workers. And good for him! That’s what a prime minister should do for a Canadian industry and the people who work in it.
And it shows in his approach to it. There is to be no “feminist gender analysis” for steel. No talk of upstream and downstream emissions. No national steel tax. No weaning the steel industry off coal. And therefore, at one of Trump’s many flighty musings, the PM undertook a full emergency tour with all the apparatus of his office, attended by national and local press, to assure all he is fighting for steel and its jobs. As said, he’s got their backs. Oil. As we say in Newfoundland, that’s a different quintal of fish. Alberta oil hasn’t been under the hint of a threat. It’s been on the rack of dozens of real ones.
For reasons everybody knows Alberta has been in a savage downturn: layoffs by the thousands, capital flight, the locust onslaught of green apocalyptics, world prices, Fort Mac nearly burned down, the pre- emption of nearly every pipeline project, prime ministerial sit downs with vaporous, ferociously anti- Fort Mac Bill Nye, Neil Young wailings, the Lamentations of Leonardo Chinook DiCaprio, B. C.’s pledges to kill Trans Mountain whatever it takes, and foreign anti-oil money (see, please see, Vivian Krause’s reporting on this). Canada’s oil industry has tasted every plague and nuisance a careless world and fitful nature can command.
Pounded then from every quarter as it has been, have we had a prime ministerial tour, an “I have your back” message for oil? The answer is so obvious the question itself is lunatic.
Should we in fastidious fairness point out that, well, there are no Trump threats of tariffs on Canadian oil? There’s a reason for that. Mainly because it’s housebound in Alberta. Trump can’t threaten a tariff on a product that doesn’t have the means of export. ( Would there were an oil industry in Quebec and Ontario. How the lyrics to this song would change.)
However, what Trump can’t do, Trudeau did. He imposed an ever- escalating internal tariff, his and Minister McKenna’s fabulous carbon (dioxide) tax. As good as a tariff in blocking a re- surgence or growth of the industry was his retooling of t he National Energ y Board to incorporate always popular gender analysis, upstream and downstream emission inventories, and every other bureaucratic torment that the busy minds of climate warriors can invent and inflict.
The cancellation of Energy East could be seen as a boost to the oil industry, though. If we’re talking about Saudi Arabia’s. Trudeau’s well- exercised love of visiting foreign l ands really shouldn’t extend to supporting t heir i ndustries as opposed to our own. Thirty- two Atlantic Liberal MPs, the whole roost of them, who know better, uttered barely a sad squeak when that thunderbolt fell. It could be said they didn’t have their oil industry’s back.
Does he have the Trans Mountain pipeline and the future of the oil industry’s back? Has the PM he gone to B.C. to state and insist on the national interest in completing the pipeline? Has he confuted the relentless propaganda of its permanent opponents? Has he ever argued with Greenpeace, Sierra Club, had one of his “conversations” with Aboriginal protesters where he made the case for the pipeline? Has he lived up to his deal with Rachel Notley? “No” to all these questions.
So when the B.C. government threatens to do all in its power to stop the project, where’s the press con- ference? Where’s the “Just Watch Me” tour on that? Where is he when agitators, inside and outside the province, publicly pledge that it will never go ahead? When does he meet and support and publicize all the Aboriginal bands that support the pipeline?
Everyone over the age of seven knows that the Trudeau government’ s“commitment” to the Trans Mountain pipeline is passionless, grudgingly reluctant, saturated with the hope that protests, court cases, civil disobedience, the B.C. government, and the simple passing of time will kill it. They know too that the Liberal party under Justin Trudeau’ s glossy leadership has become no more than a gender-climatesocial justice coalition. And finally, they know as well that the so- called carbon tax is utterly ineffectual in its stated goal of lowering global emissions. China alone chokes it to nullity every day. It is rather our cosmopolitan PM’s grandest exercise in planet- saving virtue-signalling.
And all it’s done for Canada so far is ignite what could be the first serious rift in the Confederation since Quebec danced so close to separation, seriously dampened our economy’s ability to preserve Canada’s great social supports, and placed us in direct contest with the very opposite policies of the world’s greatest economy next door. Here’s the distillation of this government’s policy on the oil industry: Too Bad We Can’t Get Rid Of It Now.
That will never be confused with, “I’ve got your back.”
HAVE WE HAD AN ‘I HAVE YOUR BACK’ MESSAGE FOR OIL?