‘The road to hell is a road’: Inside the thoughts of Steven Guilbeault

At a speech in Montreal this week, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said the Trudeau government had officially stopped building roads. The feds would maintain the “existing network,” but that’s it.

“That’s not what I said,” Guilbeault would later tell a reporter when pressed on his “no roads” policy, but his clarification said much the same thing: Henceforth, any major road project would have to be done without federal support.

In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.

MONDAY

There was a time when I was naive enough to think that the climate crisis could be solved with mere emissions reductions or alternative energy. But it becomes more clear every day that Canada can never hope to meet its climate goals unless we’re prepared to remove redundancies from our economic system.

Do we really need to produce any more music? I feel humanity has pretty well covered what a guitar or a trumpet can do; why waste scarce energy to continue heating concert halls or power tour buses? We have a food system that irresponsibly makes no distinction between the carbon footprint of certain foods: We cannot hope to be a climate leader if Canadians continue to eat prawns when a few strips of jicama could suffice.

And above all, this country is positively drowning in unnecessary roads. When the average Albertan starts up his masculinity-compensating, coal-rolling monster truck and drives it for hours on a rural Canadian highway without seeing a soul, does it not cross his mind that some resources have been wasted? That man would be fitter, happier and richer if he’d instead been able to make the trip by the more efficient method of bicycle, gondola or monorail.

TUESDAY

“Steven Guilbeault wants to ban roads,” they say. But this is not a road ban. Provinces and municipalities can still build all the roads they want. If you and your buddies pool your money for some asphalt and graders — and I decide that it meets all necessary requirements for environmental mitigation, reconciliation and gender-based impacts — then pave away.

We’ve merely correctly decided that roads are a wholly inappropriate concern for a Canadian federal government. The task of government is to focus on the fundamentals such as inclusion initiatives for federally regulated industries and means-tested dental subsidies. Things that could not exist if not done by the state.

Anybody can build a few hundred kilometres of glorified driveway.

WEDNESDAY

I’m honestly appalled at the road-worship exhibited in recent days by my Conservative colleagues. I knew they had a regressive fixation on guns, trucks and plastic straws, but even I did not suspect a mass-genuflection for mere strips of asphalt, gravel and whatever else roads are made out of.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Where else but on a road can one pursue the right-wing fantasies of unfettered resource extraction or colonialist subjugation? Where is their law-and-order militarism without latticeworks of slick, black tarmac to survey and control the citizenry? When armed capitalistic thugs violently crushed the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, how did they get there? That’s right; roads.

THURSDAY

I’m most confused by this idea that Canada must constantly build new highways and new roads, and that it’s “dangerously radical” to say otherwise. Again, I’ve said we can keep the roads we have: It’s just that 1,000,000 kilometres is enough.

Does Italy feel the need to constantly rebuild the Colosseum, or to build new Colosseums every 10 years? After they dug the Suez Canal, were there braying calls to continue cutting new canals through the Sinai Peninsula for perpetuity?

Frankly, I thought the country would see this as a victory: I’m saying we’ve built precisely as many roads as we’ll ever need and we never have to do it again. I urge the rest of Canada to follow the model of Quebec: At a certain point, your infrastructure is complete and perfect, and you can instead spend money on more worthwhile things.

FRIDAY

For all the dour talk I hear of Canada’s supposedly troubled economic future, might I suggest that the cause is an economy so devoid of creativity that they believe they need “roads” for prosperity? I’m no historian, but the Klondike Gold Rush didn’t feature a bunch of guys driving their Jeeps up a four-lane divided highway with climate-controlled rest stops. I’ve read a little about the fur trade, and I’m pretty sure the voyageurs were able to get around without even a chip-sealed two-lane road (or even a tank of gasoline, for that matter). My own ancestors came here via wind power.

What you call an “infrastructure deficit,” I call a “mental deficit.” This country needed to be snapped out of its calcified, old-fashioned reverie a long time ago. The road to hell is just that, a road.